White, English-Speaking Migrant Writers in Australia Ingeborg Van Teeseling University of Wollongong
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2011 Literary migrations: white, English-speaking migrant writers in Australia Ingeborg van Teeseling University of Wollongong
Recommended Citation Teeseling, Ingeborg van, Literary migrations: white, English-speaking migrant writers in Australia, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, English Literatures Program, University of Wollongong, 2011. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3394
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LITERARY MIGRATIONS: WHITE, ENGLISH-SPEAKING
MIGRANT WRITERS IN AUSTRALIA
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
from the
UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG
by
Ingeborg van Teeseling, BA Hons Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Faculty of Arts
English Literatures Program
2011
THESIS CERTIFICATION
CERTIFICATION
I, Ingeborg van Teeseling, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philisophy, in the Faculty of Arts, English Literatures Program, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution.
Ingeborg van Teeseling
20 September, 2011
“Thinking makes it so”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My profound gratitude goes out to Tony Simoes da Silva, Paul Sharrad, Wenche Ommundsen, Narelle Campbell, Debbie Jensen, Kerry Ross, Paul Franssen, Veerle Ultee, Harm van de Ven, Margaret Hanlon, Georgine Clarsen, Ingeborg Brounts, Steven van Teeseling, Jacqueline de Gier, Gerdie Snellers, Liselot von Barnau Sythoff, Brecht van Teeseling, Sophie Williams, Maureen Gillis, Alex Miller, John Mateer and my colleagues.
Without Hasse van Nunen and Jim Gillis this thesis would not exist.
In memory of Ed van Teeseling
ABSTRACT
Starting with a false premise can get you into all sorts of trouble. In Australia, a migrant is not necessarily somebody who has migrated to this country. People who have been born here, but look or sound different, are often referred to as ‘second’- or ‘third generation’ migrants. At the same time white, English-speaking migrants are generally not seen as migrants at all. Literal meaning is swallowed into or distorted by perceptions of a national cultural ‘core and periphery’ and institutionalised discourse, centered on multiculturalism. In this thesis I am arguing that it is this false core/periphery binary that has made a particular group of migrants ,– those who are white and have migrated from English-speaking countries – invisible – invisible as migrants, that is. For the writers within this group, this leads to critical blindness in relation to their work and place within Australian national literature. As a critic however, I look at the work of Ruth Park, Alex Miller and John Mateer and see it is profoundly influenced by their migrant experience. More often than not they write about themes that are typical of migrant writing: alienation, identity, belonging, home, being in- between cultures, history. For a more appropriate, complete appreciation of their work, this thesis argues it is imperative to go back to the beginning and return the ‘default setting’ of migrant to its literal meaning.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Social Contexts 14 1. The problem with ‘multiculturalism’ 14 2. Critical Multiculturalism 21 3. Ethnicity and race 23 4. Culture and difference 25 5. White, English-speaking migrant groups in Australia: sibling rivalry? 30 6. Migrancy and national identity 35 7. Whiteness 38 Chapter 3: The History of Migrant, Ethnic, and Multicultural literature In Australia 44 1. 1963-1979 44 2. 1980-1990 49 3. 1991 56 4. 1992-1994 60 5. 1995-1996 65 6. 1996-2002 67 7. 2003-2007 70 8. 2007-2010 72 Chapter 4: Literary Issues, Especially the Role of the Author 76 1. Barthes, Foucault, Bennett and Sontag 76 2. Before Barthes 80
3. Feminism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Migrant Writing 83 4. Migrant Themes (General) 89 5. Migrant Themes in Literature by White, English- speaking, Migrant Writers 94 6. Language 98 Chapter 5: Ruth Park: A Voice for Other Outsiders Inside 103 Chapter 6: Alex Miller: The Story of the Intimate and Private Lives Of Us 133 Chapter 7: John Mateer: Lost for Words 177 Chapter 8: Conclusion 217 Works Cited: 229 Appendix 1: Unpublished Interview with Alex Miller 270 Appendix 2: Unpublished Interview with John Mateer 282
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
One wintry afternoon I was on my way back home after picking up my then four-year old daughter from school. It was late, it was raining, I had a tired child on the front seat of my bike and two bags of groceries on the back. In short: I wanted to get inside, and fast. So the last couple of hundred meters of our trip I navigated my bike onto the footpath, to cut a few precious minutes off our trip. Immediately Hasse started to wail at the top of her lungs. When I asked her, slightly irritated, what was wrong, she told me that by cycling on the footpath I would ultimately be responsible for her death - because, the argument went: cycling here was illegal, so of course a policeman would come to arrest me; I would be taken away; she would have to go home alone. She was hungry and cold, but she didn’t know how to work the stove yet, or the heater, or the phone, to call somebody who did. So she would sit alone in our house without food or warmth. This, because of the seriousness of my offence, would take days and days. So by the time I would be released, she would have died a slow and horrible death. This, of course, would be my fault, and caused by me cycling on the footpath. Bad mother! You could call it a fallacy, but to my four-year old it made complete and utter sense. One fact followed by ruthless logic had generated an entire narrative. It wasn’t that reality did not allow alternatives, but, as Hamlet once said: “Thinking makes it so” (Shakespeare 2005, p 53). Starting with a false premise can get you into all sorts of trouble, which is, in essence, what this thesis is about. In Australia, a migrant is not necessarily somebody who has migrated to this country. People who have been born here, but look (or sound) different, are often called second- or third generation migrants. At the same time white, English-speaking migrants are generally not seen as 2
migrants at all. Literal meaning is swallowed up into or distorted by perceptions of a national cultural core and non-core, as well as institutionalised discourse centered on multiculturalism. When I came to Australia in 2006, one of the first things I realised was that I would never become a ‘real’ Australian and would always remain an outsider in the eyes of the people who were born here. The next recognition was that although that was the case, I would, in time, be considered more Australian than some people who have been born here. For most Australians I met, my accent and name were enough to position me as a foreigner. On the other hand, the fact that I looked like the average Australian – white, blond, of European descent – made me more part of what is considered the ‘core’ than some of my fellow students and friends, who were born in this country, but had Lebanese or Vietnamese heritage. They had something I ‘lacked’: colour. I quickly found out that this issue of visibility is particularly important in the case of migrants. In my country of origin, Holland, anybody who does not speak Dutch is considered a migrant. It is not the most subtle of divisions, but usually it is factually fairly accurate. In Holland, of course, it is easier to draw this conclusion, because Dutch is not the world-language English is. If you speak Dutch, there is a good chance that you are Dutch as well. So most people who do not, are not. In Australia, language is used as a measuring stick to determine migrancy as well, but in this country the results seem to be even less exact and more fraught. Here there appears to be a scale to determine the amount of outsidership. Firstly, there is the group who speaks no English or very poor English. Then there are people like me, whose first language is not English, but who manage to get to the level of near-native- with-an-accent. The third group consists of people who are bi-lingual, but whose English does not sound Australian. Yet another group contains everybody whose first language is English, but a different kind of English. There are gradations in this group, varying from Americans and New Zealanders to English and Scottish. Complicating this already complex system of difference, as I suggested above, is colour. Simplistically speaking, in Australia, being visibly different from the above- mentioned core means that white Australians presume you are a foreigner, a migrant. Once that assumption has been made, there is apparently little prospect of changing your categorisation. I learned there were categories called ‘second’ or ‘third’ generation migrants, including people who were born here, but who had a visibly different heritage. Coming from Holland, this did not make sense to me at all. Soon I 3 also realised that there were consequences to this classification system. People who were considered the most foreign, because of their accent and/or colour, were also considered the most different. This difference came with a constant request to explain identity, provenance and purpose for being in Australia. Also, people wanted to know – usually looking for a comparison with Australia – what your ‘old’ country was like, and what kind of life you had led there. At the other end of the scale, people were spared questions and ‘branding’ (for lack of a better term). However, there was also less interest in who they were before they came to Australia. To me this seemed to be a problem for both groups. In the case of the first group, difference was all people could see and wanted to hear about, while the second seemed to be insufficiently different to be allowed to tell their stories, different or not. As a reader and as a literary critic, I started to wonder how all of this would translate into literature, the home of stories, and whether my observations were in fact correct. I decided to look into the work of some white, English-speaking migrant writers in an effort to find out two things: 1. Did their migrancy play a role in their writing, and 2. If it did, did the critics and reviewers of that work recognise the fact of the migrancy and the link between the writer’s migrancy and the content of the writing? Keeping in mind, of course, that in fiction there are only echoes of private life and that the rest is representation. The aim of this exercise was to produce a re- reading and possibly even a repositioning of the work of these writers, with a view to challenging the prevalent, simplistic core/non-core models of Australian literature. My argument was that this false binary has made a particular group of writers, those who are white and have migrated from English-speaking countries, invisible – invisible as migrants, that is, and therefore invisible as migrant writers. The premise was that because they were not considered to be migrants, the essence of their writing went largely unnoticed. This is a problem, because what every writer wants more than anything, is to be heard properly. For that to happen in the case of this specific group of writers, it seems imperative to go back to the beginning and return the ‘default setting’ of ‘migrant’ to its literal meaning. To do this, I first had to start with an investigation into ways in which migrants are spoken about, positioned in social discourse and categorised in public policy, which, in turn, locates the concept of the migrant in a very particular way. For this in turn would inflect the way the kind of writing I explore is read and critiqued. I am particularly interested in how this concept is seen from the moment 4
multiculturalism became the official byword to describe the Australian nation. The word ‘multiculturalism’ was first used in Australia in 1973, by then Minister of Immigration Al Grassby, to denote a fairly broad idea of “the family of the nation” (Grassby 1973, p 5). In the roughly thirty years since Grassby’s speech, though, it seems to have evolved from this inclusive notion to a designation “related more directly to the social position and interests of ethnic minority groups” (Ang and Stratton in Bennett 1998, p 137). Writers like Ang, Stratton and Castles, as well as literary critic Sneja Gunew, have pointed to the consequence of this way of thinking for the division of Australian society into a core and a non-core or periphery. Here the core consists of white, Anglo, English-speaking, culturally similar ‘non-ethnics’, while the non-core or periphery contains everybody else. ‘Multiculturalism’, in this way, has been transformed from a term used to describe the values and practices of the whole of Australian society (denoting the fact that we are a multicultural country) into something that is associated with “(non-English-speaking) migrants” (Ang and Stratton 2001, p 100) and referring to something outside the core. ‘Multiculturalism’ functions, then, as a measuring stick of difference, defining who belongs to the nation and who does not. This binary works to fix both groups firmly into place, and, more importantly, leaves no apparent room for individuals or groups who do not easily fit into either category. Stratton, Hammerton and Thomson make this case through an investigation into the position of Irish and British migrants respectively, while Mosler and Catley look into the location of their American counterparts. Their general conclusion, that the Australian multicultural binary has made these particular migrants ‘invisible’, is partially based on their recognition that most of these migrants are not only English-speaking, but also white. Whiteness, therefore, emerges as yet another important field of investigation here. Theorists such as Ruth Frankenberg and Richard Dyer, introduced the concept of ‘whiteness’ as dangerously “unmarked and unnamed” (Frankenberg 1993, p 2). Whiteness refers also to “terms of acceptable moral difference” (Stratton 1999, p 165), to an undiscussed and undefined ‘white’ morality that is the norm. This again points to binaries that seem to be fixed, and burdened with assumptions that are both value-laden and not necessarily factually justifiable. So to bring white migrancy into visibility is to call the category whiteness and its narrative and defining power into question. Taking these societal ideas into consideration makes it easier to understand their consequences for the perception of migrant literature within Australian literature. 5
From the early 1980s onwards, Gunew took the lead in positioning migrant literature as signifying “difference” (Gunew 1983, p 18), denoting writers with a non-English- speaking background, who can be considered “ethnic” (Gunew and Mahyddin 1988, p xiii), “marginal” (Gunew 1990, p 22), and who come from “cultural traditions which do not derive from either England or Ireland” (Gunew et al 1992, p viii). Gunew’s claim points to two issues: the first one is the assumption that the ‘core’ in Australia is white and Western, usually called Anglo-Celtic, and that the periphery or non-core is ‘ethnic’ and ‘non-white’; the second one is the consequence of this core/non-core binary: the idea that there is a difference in power between the core and the non-core, that the core and non-core are not equal partners in this multi-cultural society. Starting with the first assumption, David Dutton contends that multiculturalism in Australia has constructed “a single ‘core’ culture surrounded by peripheral ‘ethnic’ cultures”. He writes that this core culture, also called “mainstream”, “was postulated as the authentic Australia”, “homogenous and identifiable”, surrounded by “the newer ‘ethnic’ Australians, marginalised in the spatial metaphor of Anglo-Celtic core and ethnic periphery and doubts attended their claims to be ‘real’ Australians” (Dutton 2002, p 154). Jon Stratton agrees that multiculturalism constructs the nation “in terms of a distinction between an Anglo-Celtic core culture and ethnic peripheral cultures”, which “forms the basis for a political conservatism which preserves ‘ethnic Australians’ as not quite proper Australians” (Stratton 1998, p 38-39). This indicates already that there are problems with the term ‘ethnicity’. With the introduction of multiculturalism, Stratton maintains, the term ‘race’ – that determined choices at the time of the White Australia Policy – was “expunged” from the “rhetoric”. Now “the discourse of ethnicity is used instead”: “central to this new meaning is its use as a marker of incompatible cultural difference” (Stratton 1998, p 32-33). I will address the concept of ethnicity in the Australian context more broadly in chapter 2, but for now it is important to state that from the complexities within the workings of ‘ethnicity’, one conclusion can be drawn: ethnicity is not something that is factual or stable. Instead, it is a relational term that points to a certain, fairly fluid, connection between core and non-core. Especially in Australia there is ample academic evidence that ethnicity is something that is attributed to the non-core, while the core has no ethnicity at all. Moreover, it is the core who decides who has got ethnicity, and having it is a sign of non-core (group) status and of marginality. Gunew writes: “Ethnicity appears to exist always in a marginal, and often negative, 6
relationship to the mainstream or hegemonic group” (Gunew 1994, p 49). Ten years later she adds to this that “ethnic” is “the code name given to those more recent immigrant settlers who do not derive from Britain or Ireland” (Gunew 2004, p 20). Hutchinson and Smith also focus on the fact that there is a “dichotomy between a non-ethnic ‘us’ and ethnic ‘others’”, which, they say, “has long continued to dog the concepts in the field of ethnicity and nationalism” (Hutchinson and Smith 1996, p 4). “We find it also in the English and American tendency to reserve the term ‘nation’ for themselves and ‘ethnic’ for immigrant peoples, as in the frequently used term ‘ethnic minorities’” (1996, p 5). As with the term ‘multiculturalism’ (see chapter 2), this leads to the conclusion that ethnics are positioned outside of the nation. In fact, Tonkin argues that “The adjective [ethnic] is readily applied to groups of relatively recent immigrants who are perceived to be sufficiently different, and indeed one measure of perceived difference would be the ease with which the adjective ‘ethnic’ could be employed” (Tonkin in Hutchinson and Smith 1996, p 22). So where older immigrant groups like Western Europeans were considered ‘ethnics’ when they arrived in Australia in the 1950s, with the influx of newer migrants their status has changed. When Dutch and German migrants arrive in Australia today they are less ‘ethnic’ than Lebanese or Somalian migrants. And English or American migrants, as long as they are white, are neither ethnic, nor migrant. There is, therefore, a ‘scale’ of ethnicity. Murji even claims that it has become a label attached to groups that are not just non- English speaking, but also, “perhaps ‘not white”’. This, he states, is problematic, because it “exoticizes ethnicity as a quality possessed by non-whites and those of non- European descent”, and “it has served to homogenize both ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ groups in terms of fixed cultural boundaries and forms of belonging” (Murji in Bennett et al 2005, p 112). In labelling certain groups ‘ethnic’, therefore, it becomes clear that it is the process and the context in which this happens that has to be focused on, not the term itself. Why are certain groups ‘ethnic’, in a certain country, at a certain time? Steve Fenton claims that the terms “ethnicity” and “ethnic group” “point to some rather more diffuse and ill-defined identities which have fleeting moments of importance, and should be understood as ‘socially constructed’ rather than profound and ‘real’” (Fenton 2003, p 1-2). He concludes that “a theory of ethnicity has to be a theory of the contexts under which it is ‘activated’” (ibid). The word, he reasons, “refers directly to something ‘out there’”, and “the best way of thinking about it is as an intellectual 7 construct of the observers” (2003, p 2). Fenton insists that at the core of deciding who has ethnicity and who does not, “is an idea of descent or ancestry” and “ideas about culture. These ideas about culture will typically include myths about the past, beliefs about ‘the kind of people we are’, and the idea that ‘culture’ defines a group” (2003, p 13). Everybody outside of that “culture” is “referred to as ‘other’ (foreign, exotic, minority)” (2003, p 23). Ethnicity, consequently, works to ‘other’ certain groups within the nation and, as Castles and Miller stress, “becoming an ethnic minority is not an automatic result of immigration, but rather the consequence of specific mechanisms of marginalisation, which affect different groups in different ways” (Castles and Miller 1998, p 32). Being part of the white American minority in Australia or the white Australian minority in New Zealand does not inevitably lead to ‘ethnicity’, while having Chinese or Algerian descent within both those countries, does. Fenton points to Americans Glazer and Moynihan, who, in 1974, first brought up the issue of ‘majority ethnicity’. “Putting it crudely”, Fenton declares, “the question being raised was ‘ethnicity – have we all got it?’, and by 1974 Glazer and Moynihan are saying ‘yes’” (Fenton 2003, p 100). The effect here, though, Fenton stresses, was not to remodel ethnicity at all: “One undertone, at least, of white ‘ethnics’ reviving interests in their origins, is that it was in response to black ethnicity. ‘If you can do it, so can we’, was the message. Glazer and Moynihan’s own essay in 1975 edges towards such a view when they refer to state dispensation of resources” (2003, p 101). ‘Ethnicity’ becomes an interesting option once support (money, visibility, sympathy, cultural capital) is attached to it, but not so much when it leads to marginalisation. Pre-empting Fenton’s ideas, Graham Huggan introduced the notion of the “exotic” (Huggan 2001, p vii) and attached it to migrant or multicultural literature. Huggan’s model is closely connected to Fenton’s notion that difference is not necessarily produced by migrant writers themselves, but by the way the observers – here the white Anglo-Celtic core – view and “designate” (2001, p 134) them. This thesis is partially aimed at testing out this theory, by scrutinising the critical reception of the work of white migrant writers. In arguing a more comprehensive reading of the work of white, English-speaking, culturally similar migrant writers, the seemingly inflexible binaries and their consequences pose a problem. This particular group of writers, whether they migrated from Britain, America, New Zealand, South Africa or elsewhere challenges easy dichotomies. According to the customary division between 8
core and periphery, their place is within the core, because they are white, English- speaking, ‘Anglo-Celtic’, and, in the Australian denotation of the word, ‘non-ethnic’. However, the act of their migrancy, and their subject matter, situates them within the periphery, the non-core. I would suggest that the mere existence of a group who disrupts the binaries in this way, is an argument for contesting these classifications altogether. Another part of my claim here is that the work of these white, English- speaking writers sometimes suffers from a limited or biased reading because of their assumed position within the core. Appreciating Roland Barthes’ model of the “death of the author” (Barthes 1977) and Michel Foucault’s theory of the “author-function” (Foucault 1979), academic schools of thought like feminist criticism, new historicism and cultural materialism have cautiously re-introduced the usefulness of including biographical readings of texts. Particularly if the author’s subjectivity is “a function of difference (gender, class, race, and so forth)” (Brannigan 1998, p 123), this is seen as an important tool within literary criticism. Literature written by migrant writers originates, I would propose, generally from an experience of difference, because its producer is someone from elsewhere, and is therefore not an insider who can write from a location of same-ness. For that reason, a contextual biographical reading, particularly of the work of migrant writers, is vital to the full understanding of this type of literature. This is why my thesis not only focuses on a close reading of the texts these writers produce, but also on the way these texts were reviewed by literary critics. For instance, positioning Alex Miller as a “non-migrant Australian writer” (Lever 1998, p 325), risks a possible misinterpretation of his work. It is my view that a migrant who writes, does not necessarily write migrant literature, which, in my definition, is literature about, or influenced by, the migrant experience. Clearly, there are migrant writers who ignore their experience and explore in their literature themes and concerns that do not rely on their background as inspiration. In this thesis, though, I concentrate on migrant writers whose work is profoundly impacted and shaped by both their heritage and their experience of migration. In the Penguin New Literary History of Australia, compiled in 1988, Bruce Bennett offered the view that “the predominant images of [these] migrant writers [...] are of prison, desert and sanctuary; all are traditional images, but contemporary migrant experience lends them peculiar force” (Bennett in Hergenhan et al 1988, p 442-3). In his discussion of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature, Bennett pointed specifically to Elizabeth Jolley. Jolley, born in the UK, but viewed as 9
a migrant because her mother was Austrian, had always been concerned, writes Bennett, “with the ‘migrant spirit’ – how people move from one country, or location, to another, in the spirit of hopes and dreams”: “Jolley’s displaced persons are at the centre of her art”, he asserts, and even flags the connection between Jolley’s personal migrancy and her literature:
Like the author herself, a number of Jolley’s characters seek solace and a sense of purpose in their new country by obtaining a small piece of land beyond the city, and working it. Here, the rural rituals of planting, pruning and burning off provide an often lyrical accompaniment to the sense of suffering and loss which are inherent in the migrant spirit (1988, p 443).
In this thesis, I will follow both Bennett’s ‘definition’ of migrant literature and its concerns, as well as his insight into the link between the migrant writer’s experience of migrancy and his or her work. In acknowledging the experience that informs the literature, a number of gains can be made. Firstly, the critical understanding of the work itself will benefit from a broader and more inclusive reading. Contextualising the literary product will provide insight into both the source of the writing as well as the position the writer speaks from. This, in turn, can give valuable information about the way both Australian literature and Australian society as a whole locate and view this particular kind of migrant writer, which can produce a more nuanced model and practice in Australian literature. From this, statements can be made about the set binaries and their usefulness, not just in the assessment of differences within Australian literature, but also in a broader, societal context. Reconsidering the binaries not only liberates these white, English-speaking migrant writers from their predetermined sites, but it can also help to redefine the ‘Anglo- Celtic’ core, as well as the perception of the writing of non-white, non-English- speaking migrant writers. Following this route, then, can bring back a wider and less obstructed way of reading all types of Australian literature. I am not arguing here for the type of revisionism that includes the white, English-speaking migrant writer into a category of fetishised victim. What I am advocating is a fresh look at the different facets of Australian literature, based on factual ‘evidence’, not questionable assumptions. It seems to me that in contemporary debates about Australian literature, migrant writers have disappeared from view altogether. The focus now seems to be on the projection of Australian literature as one 10
indivisible body of work, ready for its “internationalisation” (Dixon 2007, p 21). There is a call for “cosmopolitanism”, or “transnationalism” (ibid), for Australian literature to be viewed as part of the literature of the world. The risk here is that as a result of this process, internal differences will be obscured. Re-focussing on these differences, on what they mean and where they come from, opens up the discussion about Australian literature in all its interesting facets, instead of presenting it as one indivisible package to the international market.
My choice in selecting Ruth Park, Alex Miller and John Mateer as case studies, is based on a number of reasons. Firstly, the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand are by far the biggest suppliers of white, English-speaking migrants to Australia, with respectively 21.545, 7.201 and 25.578 “settler-arrivals” (Australian Government DIC 2010, p 4-7). Furthermore, I was interested to see whether their moment of arrival, seen in terms of this country’s (multicultural) history, made any difference in the way their work was received and discussed, and whether there were variations in their ‘invisibility’. Consequently, I opted for Ruth Park, who migrated from New Zealand to Australia in 1942, during WWII and well before the advent of multiculturalism. The second writer I investigated is Alex Miller, who arrived here in 1952 as a young Englishman, in the midst of a wave of particularly European migration. The third writer is South African John Mateer, who made Australia his home in 1989, in the middle of the multicultural experiment. Not only did these three writers arrive here at different periods, but they also vary in gender and in age – Park was born in 1917, Miller in 1936 and Mateer in 1971. What they have in common is that their work has enjoyed a certain measure of critical acclaim. Also, they were adults when they entered this country, having lived their formative years in their country of birth, which has shaped their cultural and social foundations. This thesis will also draw on interviews conducted with Alex Miller and John Mateer. In terms of methodology, I chose to interview the writers to hear what they themselves had to say about their work, their migrant experience and the way it had influenced their work, and to find out what their views were on the reception of that work. Alex Miller and John Mateer agreed, and their opinions are voiced throughout this thesis. Ruth Park declined, but in her case I had her two autobiographies to work with. In addition to the interviews, I examined the academic and journalistic reviews of the literature written by the three writers, and compared and contrasted these to my 11
own close readings of the texts, as well as to the writers’ views of their own work. All of this resulted in the following chapter-structure. Chapter 2 investigates the concepts that are vitally important in the construction of ‘multiculturalism’ in Australia. I trace the history and current usage of terms that have become more and more contested over time; concepts like multiculturalism, ethnicity, race, culture, difference, migrancy and whiteness. In each case, it seems clear that notions that start their ‘working life’ relatively neutral, quickly become ideologically and normatively loaded. Also, it appears as though the binaries that existed before multiculturalism was introduced as government policy are reinforced rather than diminished by this policy. Chapter 3 explores the history of what was successively denoted as ‘migrant’, ‘ethnic’, and ‘multicultural’ literature. Here I scrutinize the changing conceptions of these terms, and the place this type of literature occupies within the broad spectre of Australian literature. Considering the various definitions and their backgrounds, I look at whether they are still connected to a writer’s physical act of migration, and ask why this often does not seem to be the case. I also explore how certain migrant writers are included in the category of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature, while others are not. And again, as in chapter two, I endeavour to find out how this type of grouping affects the core/non-core binary. Chapter 4 addresses some ‘technical’ literary issues, such as the role of the author and the way academic models have described and demarcated her influence on her text. I also look at different schools of reading and their attitude towards including biographical analysis into an understanding of a literary work. I ask how all of this relates to migrant writing and what an informed reading of these particular texts could or should look like. This chapter starts the discussion about the work of white, English-speaking migrants, and flags both the issue of visibility and the difficulty of marking difference via language. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 pay specific attention to the writers. In sequence, according to the order of their arrival and age, Chapter 5 undertakes a close reading of the work of Ruth Park. Park, who caused a furore with her first book, The Harp in the South, has, from that first foray into the lives of marginalised outsiders, always written about belonging. Both in her novels about her native New Zealand and those set in Australia, Park’s protagonists struggle with displacement and dislocation. Although Park’s work has a clear background in pre-multicultural, White Australia, it 12 always sides with migrants and other outsiders. From reading Ruth Park’s autobiography, available interviews and her own essays, this tendency, I claim, may be seen as rooted in her own migrant experience. Yet, since her reviewers did not necessarily recognise Park as a migrant, her work was very rarely read in this context. The same can be said for Alex Miller, who is the subject of Chapter 6. Miller, a two-time winner of the Miles Franklin Award, has written nine novels, all of them featuring protagonists who are outsiders, often in more ways than one. From The Tivington Nott to Lovesong, Miller’s narrators try to grapple with internal and external questions of alienation. Miller’s books offer sophisticated literary investigations into issues relating to the ‘ownership’ of place, the possibility of an uncomplicated identity after migration, the role of history, and the nature of belonging and home. They are also, incidentally, frequently inflected by an overt awareness of whiteness and its role in Australian society. In his case, critical reviews of his work have – over time – acknowledged this presence of migrant themes, but the connection between the migrancy of the writer and the content of his work has hardly ever been clearly noted. The positioning of John Mateer as a migrant writer seems more visible to his reviewers. Also, Mateer’s work and its reception is confirmation, if any was needed, of Nicholas Birns’ assertion that “Grouping authors together because of their racial background foregrounds not the unanimity but the diversity that these sorts of rubrics can bring into literary discourse” (Birns 2010, p 185). As I discuss in Chapter 7, this South African-born poet wrestles with what I would call ‘cultural schizophrenia’ and his notion (not always based in reality) that his work is misheard and misunderstood in Australia. What he is trying to make clear is that the fact that he was born in South Africa greatly influences his view of Australia, and therefore his writing. As a consequence of Mateer’s belief that nobody is really listening to what he is saying, his most recent work has almost entirely turned away from his adopted country, and is marked by confusion and sadness. Finally, in Chapter 8 this thesis calls for the importance of biographical reading in Australian literary studies and for a return to a literal understanding of the term ‘migrant’. I am not advocating biographical reading as a sine qua non, but as a valuable, additional tool in understanding a text, especially if that text has been written by a migrant writer. By returning visibility to all groups of migrant writers in multicultural countries like Australia, and investigating connections between these authors and their work, a more complete comprehension of the text might be obtained. 13
It also tries to assess what the consequences might be of dispensing with core/non- core binaries, as well as implying further possible research, for instance into the positioning of Australian literature as global or local, or into the future possibilities of “multivocality” (Smith 2009). It will also briefly look at the current differences in Australian and European views of the present and future value of multiculturalism as a concept to define a particular society. My aim is that the ideas thrown up in this thesis will help to open up a space for a more complete reading of all Australian writers who have been wedged into categories that do not fit them. Only then will it be possible to fully appreciate the breadth of the exceptional writing that is being done in (and about) this country.
14
CHAPTER 2
SOCIAL CONTEXTS
1. The problem with ‘multiculturalism’
The first problematic concept in the Australian context is that of multiculturalism. As David Bennett stated, just over ten years ago, “‘Multiculturalism’ is fast following ‘postmodernism’ from the isolation ward of scare quotes into the graveyard of unusable, because overused, jargon” (Bennett 1998, p 1). Mark Lopez, in his study into the origins of multiculturalism, argues that multiculturalism in Australia tentatively emerged shortly after the word was conceived in Canada in 1964 by Senator Paul Yuzyk. Between 1966 and 1968, Lopez maintains, Australian politics developed something he calls “proto-multiculturalism”, a type of “anti-assimilationism”, designed to better manage migrant settlement policy (Lopez 2000, p 2). This particular model was followed, between 1972 and 1975, by a number of different versions, eventually ‘settling’ in the one still active today. Lopez explains that in his view, multiculturalism has two meanings,
used interchangeably. It can be used to refer to an empirical demographic and sociological fact: that Australia is an ethnically and culturally diverse, multilingual society. It is also used to denote an ideological/normative concept about the way Australian society is or should be organised. It is often used to mean both, when the intention is to imbue the ideological/normative concept with objective factual weight (2000, p 3).
This is not so much a definition as a description of the ways that from the start, the term has plagued the discussion about multiculturalism. It shows how ‘multiculturalism’, in the Australian context, has always been used to both describe a fact, namely that Australia consists of many cultures, and a management-tool, 15
employed by successive governments to organise these cultures. Australian multiculturalism is associated with concepts like race, ethnicity, culture, difference, language and national identity, notions that are in and by themselves difficult to define, let alone agree on. I will address all of them later, but want to focus, for the moment, on the definition and use of the term ‘multiculturalism’. While Lopez describes multiculturalism as essentially an “ideology”, or a word used to describe a “historical period in which that ideology was dominant” (2000, p 4), Castles et al argue that multiculturalism was in fact mainly the consequence of changed demographics. After the Second World War, an Australia in need of a growing work force, and faced with British migrants arriving in insufficient numbers, led the government of the day to decide to open the borders to migrants from other parts of Europe. By 1972, Castles contends, these migrants had become “an important part of the electorate in traditional working-class areas”, and the ALP needed a form of “ethnic politics” to “woo” them (Castles in Hage and Couch 1999, p 33). Multiculturalism was the answer, a word used for the first time by Whitlam’s Minister of Immigration Al Grassby in his 1973 speech ‘A Multi-Cultural Society for the Future’. Interestingly enough, Grassby only uses the word “multi-cultural” in the title of his speech, not in the text itself. There we have to contend with more general descriptions, like “a society based on equal opportunity for all” (Grassby 1973, p 1), where everybody can “develop their personal potential, no matter how diverse their origins, beliefs, wealth or ability” (ibid). Grassby talks about “the ‘family of the nation’ ”, where it is not necessary to “impose a sameness”, nor deny the members “their individuality and distinctiveness” (1973, p 5). Although “migrants as a constituency” and the growing power of “ethnic groups as a community” (Castles et al 1992 [1988], p 64) informed Whitlam’s switch to multiculturalism, the term ‘multicultural’ was not mentioned in the Hansard index until early 1977. This is a delay that Castles et al view as “a fairly poignant comment on the degree of priority accorded it by the Whitlam ministry” (1992 [1988], p 59). After the demise of the Whitlam government, Castles insists, it was widely expected that the Fraser administration would abandon multiculturalism, but it maintained it for the same reasons the ALP had embraced it. During the Fraser era, the Galbally Report was published, one of the most important documents on Australian multiculturalism, that had, according to Castles et al, “a limited political goal: the incorporation into conservative politics of the ethnic middle classes”. 16
Essentially, its purpose was to assure the “‘leaders’ of ethnic communities” that they were “being ‘taken seriously’ in high places” (Castles et al 1992 [1988], p 66). Multiculturalism, therefore, was not so much a high ideal, but born out of economical and political necessity: to prevent alienating a growing ‘ethnic’ electorate. According to Castles et al, it was this fear that kept the concept of multiculturalism alive throughout the 1980s. After the debate generated by conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1984 and his attack on the level of Asian immigration to Australia and on multiculturalism, there was “a widespread feeling” that “the ‘ethnic vote’ no longer counted. ALP strategists thought that multicultural sacred cows could be slaughtered without much protest” (1992 [1988], p 74-75). But after trying to abolish organisations and backtrack on provisions, the ALP realised that it had miscalculated: “there was a speedy and emphatic reaction from ethnic organizations, with public meetings, media statements and demonstrations held all over the country”, and people like Hawke “henceforth lost no opportunity to press ethnic flesh” (1992 [1988], p 75- 76). Of course ‘multiculturalism’ is a multifaceted term, with political and cultural associations. But the fact that multiculturalism policy, and not just migration policy, is in essence a response to demographic changes and economic needs was apparent even fairly recently. In his foreword to the latest document on ‘Population Flows’, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Evans, stated that immigration has to be “managed” to “meet the chronic skills shortages”. “Targets” need to be set “according to the economic circumstances of the day”, “driven by the needs of industry” and the consequences of “demographic change” (Evans 2009, p iii). Indeed, the document states that “The overall objectives of the migration program are to contribute to Australia’s economic, demographic and social well being” (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2009, p 25). Evans here prefers the term “cultural diversity” over “multiculturalism”, but it is clear that helping migrants turn into multicultural citizens is less a priority than the economic needs of the nation. Or, as George Crowder writes, “the purpose of immigration, and therefore of multiculturalism” is the
promotion of economic growth; this view is prominent in the Australian federal government’s principal policy declarations on multiculturalism (Commonwealth of Australia 1999, 2003). On this view, the chief value of cultural diversity is that it enhances the skilled labour pool, multiplies 17
contracts for overseas trade, and expands domestic markets (Parkin and Hardcastle 1997: 494) (Crowder in Brahm Levey 2008, p 44).
Multiculturalism as a policy is therefore primarily present to serve the needs of Australia, not those of migrants (of whatever background). It raises the standard of the economy, helps the country out of a difficult demographic bind and by focussing on highly skilled migrants, subsequent governments have ensured “the needs of industry” are met. This, though, is not what I would call the ‘image’ of multiculturalism. Looking at academic definitions of multiculturalism, it is interesting to note that most of them associate the word and the idea with “the interests and claims of newer immigrants groups, often from non-English speaking parts of the world, as against older established immigrant groups (primarily from the United Kingdom and Ireland)” (Glass in Brahm Levey 2008, p 188). Ien Ang argues that it is predominantly concerned “with the presence of non-white migrant communities in white, Western societies” (Ang in Bennett et al 2005, p 226), and that the “discourse of multiculturalism” is “related more directly to the social position and interests of ethnic minority groups” (Ang and Stratton in Bennett 1998, p 137). Sneja Gunew asserts that the word has “very specific local inflections. In the UK it refers to black- white relations”, or at least it centres on “peoples who have been recently oppressed by colonialism”. In the United States, it connects to “historically marginalised groups”, while in Canada it focuses on “those who are not included in the English- French axis”. According to Gunew, Australia uses yet another definition. Here “it incorporates all those other than the original settler-colonising groups composed mainly of people from the UK and Ireland”. There is, she says, a tendency to translate “multicultural” into “non-Anglo-Celts” (Gunew 1994).
The first issue here is whether there is such a thing as a homogeneous, white, identifiable core, that is associated with “unreflexive notions of an ‘Australian way of life’” (Stratton and Ang 2001, p 100). An immigration report, published by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in 2009, states that new migrants have to be encouraged and financially assisted to develop “Australian life skills”, without explaining what those are and how they differ from, for instance, Danish or Hungarian life skills. The second problem has to do with the term “ethnic”, which in this case seems to be defined as “not white, not English-speaking and not Anglo- Celtic”. The issue there, amongst others, is that, according to the 2006 census, out of 18
the 4.416.029 people who identified themselves as overseas-born, 1.675.320 came from what the government calls “major English speaking countries”, defined as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, the United States, South Africa and New Zealand. Most of these people are white, English speaking, and the biggest groups are Anglo- Celtic. Furthermore, 24.7% of Australians still claim English ancestry, and Britain remains the top source country for new migrants (23.5%) (Department of Immigration 2009, p 52). This means that, confusingly, migrants can be part of the core culture, as long as they are white and Anglo-Celtic, while non-migrants, who are ‘ethnic’, but born in Australia, are considered part of the periphery or non-core. Another consequence of this way of defining multiculturalism is that it “creates a situation in which white or ‘Anglo-Celtic’ Australians are encouraged to construct themselves as outside ‘multicultural Australia’” (Stratton and Ang 2001, p 100). Multiculturalism, then, becomes something not attached to the nation as a whole or to its national identity, but to ‘ethnics’: it turns into “the unthinking and automatic association of multiculturalism with (non-English-speaking) migrants, as if it has nothing to do with the ‘core culture’” (ibid). Following on from this, it could be said that there are, then, two Australias: one white, English-speaking and Anglo-Celtic and defined as the core, and one multicultural, ‘ethnic’ Australia, that is positioned outside the core. If this conclusion can be drawn, then in talking about multicultural Australia we are not addressing the whole nation, but only part of it. Therefore, multiculturalism is not a term that can be used to describe “unity in diversity” (Department of Immigration 2009, p 3), but one that is used to differentiate between ‘ethnics’ and ‘non-ethnics’, where ‘ethnics’ are associated with multiculturalism and ‘non-ethnics’ are not. To confuse the argument even further, multiculturalism has always been associated, and often conflated, with migration. “The minister responsible for multiculturalism has always been the Minister for Immigration”, James Jupp observes (Jupp 1996, p 7). “This connection between immigration and multiculturalism has dogged the policy of multiculturalism” (Stratton 1998, p 40), in the way that it has perpetuated a tension between an inclusive ideal for the nation as a whole, and a recognition of the diverse social mix the nation has become. One of the biggest challenges is that migration and its consequence, the influx of ‘ethnic’ groups, is sometimes considered an attack on the presumed homogeneous core culture and the national identity. Stratton quotes Peter Cochrane’s analysis of the white backlash during the Hanson-era: “Hanson is the voice of old Anglo-Celtic Australia, resentful 19
of its displacement from the centre of Australian cultural life by the new ethnic Australians and nostalgic for a time when it imagined its identity was both secure and central” (1998, p 29). Stratton and Ang also point to Docker, who maintains that there is an apparent
binary relation between ‘ethnic communities’ and ‘Australian society’, as if the two were mutually exclusive, internally homogeneous entities. Such a representation not only constructs the latter as ‘always devaluing, hierarchising, othering’ the former, but also pigeonholes ‘the migrant’ as permanently marginalised, forever ethnicised. […] In this image of the nation, the ethnicisation of minority cultures depends on the prior existence of a non- ethnicised Australian cultural centre (of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ origin and expressed as ‘the Australian way of life’), forged from the cultural reductions of assimilationism (Stratton and Ang in Bennett 1998, p 158).
This idea locates multiculturalism not only outside of the core culture, but, even more troubling, as threatening that core culture, and given that the core culture is described as “the Australian way of life”, as threatening the essence of the Australian national identity. This might be the reason why John Howard, and even Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, are now famous for their dislike of the word multiculturalism. Howard, as Ang and Stratton stress, “abolished the Office of Multicultural Affairs” as soon as he gained governmental power. He “severely slashed the migrant intake, and tightened up English proficiency requirements for new migrants. He also restricted access for new immigrants to social welfare and other benefits”, and would have “preferred to scrap” the word multiculturalism “from the national vocabulary” (Stratton and Ang 2001, p 97). The Rudd and Gillard governments have not reinstated the word multiculturalism, either in official vocabulary or in the naming of its departments, preferring the more descriptive term “culturally diverse”. In 2008, Chris Evans set up the Australian Multicultural Advisory Council (AMAC), but despite the name its brief was “to provide advice on social cohesion issues and on communicating the benefits of cultural diversity to the Australian community” (Lundy 2010, p 3). The new Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Citizenship, Kate Lundy, wrote that in assessing AMAC’s 2010 advice, government was focussing on “how we share in the benefits of our diversity – and how we capitalise on the potential that it brings” (ibid). AMAC’s advice, called ‘The People of Australia’, was a glossy, 19-page paper that looked like an advertisement brochure, full of smiling ‘ethnics’. Andrew Jakubowicz, professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and the 20
Chair of the Institute for Cultural Diversity, was highly critical. He called the Statement “minimalist” and asserted that “with this report, imagery is everything and there is far more white space, colour fillers and pictures than text or argument”. The report, Jakubowicz writes, gives “a taste of what multiculturalism will mean – not a Bill of Rights, not a Multiculturalism Act, but only enough support to ‘get on your feet’, to avoid ‘long term dependence’, and then nothing special”. “From then on it’s slowly slowly, lightly lightly, and nothing that will scare those who see diversity as a potential threat”. AMAC’s recommendations are “general and lacking punch”, “the most minimal offering possible” (Jakubowicz 2010, p 1-2). The fact that multiculturalism is defined as located outside of the core culture (the ‘real’ Australia) has left it open to severe criticism and attacks from that same core. Mark Lopez, in reflecting on what he calls “the multicultural debate in Australia”, lists a number of hot issues: reconciliation with the Aborigines, “along with illegal immigration, refugees and border protection”. His comment shows how, because multiculturalism is so closely associated with migration and ‘ethnicity’, every time there is a (perceived) problem in those areas, both the word and the concept come under attack. Multiculturalism seems to be acceptable only as tokenism, where it concerns food or non-threatening (cultural) performances. The moment that ‘ethnics’ do not adhere to the religious, political or cultural ideas of the core, multiculturalism becomes controversial. As Hugh MacKay writes:
Anxiety about Muslims is more about ‘otherness’ than religion; more about identity than spirituality (as, indeed, was the earlier prejudice against Catholics). The true source of current uneasiness is the worry that Muslims might be more inclined than other ethnic or cultural minorities to hang back from fully embracing Australian culture and identity. Nothing irritates or offends long-term Australian residents like the thought that any group of immigrants might choose to be anything less than wholehearted Australians (MacKay 2007, p 147).
Xenophobia, in this way, is disguised as patriotism, an adherence to the principles of a dinky-di Australianism that is never defined, but enshrined as sacred nevertheless. This takes us back to Ghassan Hage’s idea of tolerance as a basically racist white fantasy, where tolerance is seen more as a sign of power than as a mode of “morally ‘good’ practice” (Hage 1998, p 79). ‘Core’ Australia can accept ‘multicultural’ Australia as long as the latter does not rock the boat, or the foundations of what is conceived as the accepted national identity. When the non-core oversteps that mark, 21
tolerance is withheld and multiculturalism gets yet another beating. The conclusion one might infer, is that, as Wenche Ommundsen stresses, the term “multiculturalism emerges as an increasingly incoherent and nebulous concept” (Ommundsen 2000, p 159). It is not a term, or a concept, or an idea, or an ideology, or a practice, as much as it is a discourse, a vessel that is at the same time too empty and too full to be of use.
2. Critical Multiculturalism
The middle of the 1990s saw the emergence of a different type of multiculturalism, dubbed ‘critical multiculturalism’, mostly outside of Australia and mainly concentrated in the United States. In his introduction to Multiculturalism, a Critical Reader, David Theo Goldberg states that a new analysis of multiculturalism was necessary because “the various forms of multiculturalism [...] are deeply implicated in the contest over power” (Goldberg 1994, p 30). Goldberg singles out a “liberal multiculturalism” that is only “willing to share power” “on the terms of those already holding it” (Ibid). One of the contributors to the book, Peter McLaren, differentiates between what he considers different versions of multiculturalism. Conservative multiculturalism “uses the term ‘diversity’ to cover up the ideology of assimilation that undergirds its position” and views “ethnic groups” as “’add-ons’ to the dominant culture. Before you can be ‘added on’ [...] you must first adopt a consensual view of culture and learn to accept the essentially Euro-American patriarchal norms of the ‘host’ country” (McLaren 1994, p 49). Then there is “liberal multiculturalism”, “based on the intellectual ‘sameness’ among the races” (1994, p 51), and “left-liberal multiculturalism” that “tends to exoticize ‘otherness’ in a nativistic retreat that locates difference in a primeval past of cultural authenticity”. This type of multiculturalism, McLaren states, forces the ‘other’ to first “show one’s identity papers before dialogue can begin” (1994, p 51-52). The alternative to these ‘brands’ of multiculturalism is “critical or resistance multiculturalism” (1994, p 53). Its agenda is social transformation and its perspective is that “sameness” and “difference” are in a “false opposition”. Also, the aim of critical multiculturalism is not a “harmonious” and “consensual” culture; “social justice” is, and this can only be attained “within a politics of cultural criticism” (1994, p 53). Later thinkers on critical multiculturalism, like Lesliee Antonette, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg and Stephen May, all focus on issues that have also 22
dogged the Australian version of multiculturalism. “Noncritical multiculturalism”, Antonette writes, “reiterates elements of racist discourse” by presenting “difference [...] outside of the dominant culture” and relying on “visible markers” of that difference (Antonette 1998, p 8). She also asks the seemingly logical question that “if we agree that America is a historically multiethnic/racial social organization, why is there a concept called multiculturalism, which logically appears to be placed in opposition with that which is not multicultural?” (1998, p 13). Kincheloe and Steinberg go even further, stating that “multiculturalism is not someting one believes in or agrees with, it simply is” (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1997, p 2). Their main critique of multiculturalism is that it has lost its sting: it “has absorbed such a generous dose of moral relativism that politically grounded action for social justice is subverted before it can begin” (1997, p 16). “Issues of cultural diversity are reduced to points of ‘cultural enrichment’ that can be extolled without upsetting the power of dominant groups” (1997, p 17). Kincheloe and Steinberg are mainly concerned with the practical application of critical multiculturalism in American education and therefore vow to “attempt to expose the subtle and often hidden educational processes that privilege the already affluent and undermine the efforts of the poor” (1997, p 24). They “seek a diversity that understands the power of difference when it is conceptualized within a larger concern with social justice” (1997, p 27). For Stephen May as well, critical multiculturalism is mainly a tool for the classroom, a way of making “antiracist education” possible (May 1999, p 7). Also, he wants to prevent the “increasing articulation of new ‘cultural racisms’ where ‘race’ as signified is transmuted into the seemingly more acceptable discourse of ‘cultural differences’” (1999, p 12), voiced in terms of ethnicity. From the early 2000s, critical multiculturalism seems to have been subsumed into whiteness studies, to which I will come back later. In Australia it never really caught on as a theory, possibly because of the difference in racial issues between the US and Australia. In 1994, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture launched an issue called ‘Critical Multiculturalism’, but neither its editor nor the contributors explored the new term. Much can be deduced from its triple focus, though: firstly on Asia, then on ‘ethnicity, race and nation’ and lastly on ‘Aboriginal and Indigenous Issues’ (O’Regan 1994, p 2-8). These issues point to the very specific geographical and historical influences in Australian multiculturalism, distinctly different to those that govern the American discussion. Also, it seems that the 23
Australian debate is less singularly introspective and national. Although it pays attention to issues that circle around nation and nationhood, it also looks abroad for comparisons, inspiration and explanations. Where the American analysis focuses almost entirely on America itself, Australian academics, at least in this journal, cast their eye on countries like Canada, the US, Britain, the Cook Islands and Japan. Lastly, American critical multiculturalists seem preoccupied with anti-racism, while their Australian counterparts concentrate on the influences of postcolonialism on their thinking. It is yet another example of the fact that ‘multiculturalism’, critical or not, is a term with many meanings.
3. Ethnicity and race
What multiculturalism does have in common everywhere around the world, is that it rests upon understandings of ‘ethnicity’. Therefore it is helpful to look at the various definitions and interpretations of that term next. Again, there is much confusion here. Malik argues that the word “is used in a fairly promiscuous way, without there ever being a consensus about its meaning” (Malik 1996, p 174). Treliving affirms that there is also “no international standard classification of ethnicity”, and that the classification systems used in both Australia and New Zealand are “based on self-assessed identification with an ethnic group” (Treliving 2001, p 1). There are differences between the two countries, but in Australia the measurement of ethnicity in the census is derived from a definition favoured by W.D. Borrie, who followed a 1983 United Kingdom Law Lord’s statement that the key factor in identifying an ethnic group is “perception: the group sees itself, and others regard it, as a distinctive community on the basis of several characteristics” (Borrie 2001, p 6). Those characteristics are
A long shared history, the memory of which is kept alive. A cultural tradition, including family and social customs, sometimes religiously based. A common geographic origin. A common language. A common literature. A common religion. Being a minority (often with a sense of being oppressed). Being racially conspicuous (ibid).
According to Hutchinson and Smith, the term ‘ethnicity’ was officially introduced for the first time in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1953. From the start, Tonkin claims,
24
the term seems to have rediscovered, even without intention, the ‘us and them’ duality that related terms have had through most of recorded history. ‘Race’ as a term did not, so to speak, discriminate. Within the discourse of race, everybody had one, everybody belonged to one. In actual use, however, not everybody belongs to an ‘ethnic group’, or has ‘ethnicity’. In their common employment, the terms have a strong and familiar bias towards ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ (Tonkin et al in Hutchinson and Smith 1996, p 22).
It seems that self-definition is not the key here, but on the contrary, the way people are regarded by others. And there is another question that comes up after reading Tonkin’s description. If not everybody has ethnicity and the litmus test is difference, then the question becomes: ‘different from what?’ Jon Stratton maintains that ethnicity “came to be used in official multicultural-speak as a way of distinguishing different cultural groupings within the racial category defined as ‘white’” (Stratton 2000, p 24). Stratton adds that “Ethnics are migrants, NESBs” (Stratton 1998, p 13), but not every migrant is an ethnic: “Those migrants who come from English-speaking countries, and who are themselves first-language English speakers, and those Australians descended from such migrants, do not tend to get identified ethnically” (Stratton 2000, p 24). Ethnicity, here, is not so much about colour as it is connected to language and culture. Within the classification ‘white’, there are some who have ethnicity, and some who have not. The white core and white English-speaking migrants are not attributed with ethnicity, while other whites, the non-English- speakers, are.
But ‘ethnicity’ is also closely related to ‘race’. Although ‘race’ has biological associations and ‘ethnicity’ does not, both are connected to cultural distinctiveness, which leads Graham Huggan to wonder whether “the double movement described by a blurring of race and ethnicity, on the one hand, and a transposition of race onto culture, on the other” is a sign of ethnicity working as if it was “‘race’ after an attempt to take the biology out” (Huggan 2007, p 16). For Dutton this is not even a question. In his view, the “rise of discourses of ethnicity has been due, in part, to replacing the language of race with a more palatable one” (Dutton 2002, p 22-23). In a country like Australia, where ‘race’ is particularly associated with the White Australia Policy, it is understandable that difference within multiculturalism needed a new term: ‘ethnicity’. More than ‘race’, it seems to be a catch-all term, which can mean anything according to the circumstances and the need for a particular social construct. Whether it is used 25 to divide a minority group from the majority group on the basis of colour, language, culture or heritage, the result is the same: those who have got it are ‘them’, those who have not are ‘us’. ‘Us’ are ‘we’ who have the power to decide to what extent ‘they’ are part of ‘us’, and to change that arrangement when it suits ‘us’. In that regard, ethnicity does work the same way as race: it is a tool used to include or exclude. Ethnics are others, not part of the core culture of the time. They are deemed to be part of a clearly bounded group, which is peripheral to the nation, and they do not have the choice to either accept or refuse the label. At the same time, it can be said that white, English-speaking migrants or their descendants do not have ethnicity, even if they ascribe it to themselves. This way ethnicity is a trap: once you are in, it is very difficult to get out. And once you are out, it is difficult to get in, should you want to.
4. Culture and difference
The next word that needs clarifying is ‘culture’, because of the way it is used within discussions of multi-culturalism in Australia. Kwame Antony Appiah cynically notes that
It hasn’t escaped notice that ‘culture’ – the word – has been getting a hefty workout in recent years. The notion seems to be that everything from anorexia to zydeco is illuminated by being displayed as the product of some group’s culture. It has reached the point that when you hear the word ‘culture’ you reach for your dictionary. Culture’s major rival in its kuzu-like progression is ‘diversity’, a favourite now of corporate CEOs and educational administrators, politician and pundits. And ‘cultural diversity’ brings these two trends together (Appiah 2005, p 114).
In Graham Huggan’s view, the current usage of ‘culture’ in the Australian context points to “all cultural forms, interacting in a transnational context, as strands in a global, hybridised pattern of dis- and relocation” (Huggan 2007, p 38). Focussing on Australia, Huggan therefore wonders why the notion of a ‘core culture’ is still prevalent in the Australian discussion, and what that term means. “To a large extent”, Huggan asserts,
it seems to correspond to what Jan Larbalestier calls ‘the imagined space of White Australia’: ‘the cultural centre from which all other ways of being in the world are evaluated, and understandings of assimilation, integration and diversity are accommodated’ (Larbalestier 1999, p 147). Core culture, 26
understood this way, has as much to do with older, reactionary ways of thinking about White Australia as it does with the cultural pluralism of a newly multi-ethnic Australia – not that these two apparently contending ideologies are necessarily opposed (Hage 1998, Stratton 1999) [...] Core culture isn’t just an ‘ethnic substratum which [...] underpins identity and community’ (Dixon 1999, p 55), it is also a distinctly moral entity that draws sustenance from a reservoir of allegedly shared values and beliefs (Stratton 1999) (Huggan 2007, p 76-77).
In referring to Ghassan Hage and Jon Stratton, Huggan points to two very vocal critics of what ‘culture’ in the Australian frame of reference has done to the debate about migration. Stratton signals the “assumption that there is a core Australian culture, described by both Hanson and Howard as ‘mainstream’ Australian culture, and that ‘ethnic’ cultures exist somehow as peripheral adjuncts” (Stratton 1998, p 16). He also argues that “where previously race operated as a reductive concept and was thought to determine culture, now culture is the more privileged term and race is thought to be a signifier of culture” (1998, p 11). In Hage’s view this implies that white Australians are still “at the centre of the Australian cultural map”, which to him “conjures the images of a multicultural fair where the various stalls of neatly positioned migrant cultures are exhibited and where the real Australians, bearers of the White nation [...] walk around and enrich themselves” (Hage 1998, p 118). All these ideas seem to lead to the conclusion voiced by Castles and Miller that “culture is becoming increasingly politicised in all countries of immigration. As ideas of racial superiority lose their ideological strength, exclusionary practices against minorities increasingly focus on issues of cultural difference” (Castles and Miller 2003, p 38). In an age where the word ‘race’ is no longer usable, ‘culture’, and especially ‘cultural difference’ have replaced it, and with it comes the connotation of cultural difference indicating something that is ‘less than’ the cultural norm. Of course, this narrows what this ‘difference’ can entail. If ‘cultural difference’ stands for race, this, again, means that people who are not deemed racially different are also not seen as culturally different. This is one of the issues this thesis raises. At the same time, people who are deemed racially different will always also be culturally different, whether they are or not. This obvious confusion forces a closer look into the next concept, that of ‘difference’.
In trying to define difference, Ien Ang insists that the word has “emerged as a keyword in cultural politics in the late 1960s”. This notion, “literally, the quality of 27 being unlike or dissimilar” has lost “its descriptive innocence” and has become “a highly charged concept”: “the expression of dissent or critique of the oppressive social homogeneity imposed by the dominant sections of society” (Ang in Bennett et al 2005, p 84). To Ang, difference is closely connected to binary oppositions, where “the same and the different are often placed in a hierarchical relationship, as the different is purely negatively defined as that which is not-same, as deviant from the norm (or the normal)” (ibid). Ang goes on to point to the fact that, especially in the twentieth century, “difference is extemporaneously equated with (and reduced to) cultural difference” (2005, p 86). In the Australian context of multiculturalism as a bureaucratic idea, an “encompassing framework of the state” rather than a descriptor of societal make-up, “difference becomes the cornerstone of diversity: diversity is a managerial, bird’s eye view of the field of differences, which needs to be harmonized, controlled, or made to fit into a coherent (often national) whole” (ibid). The first of Ang’s arguments to explore is the idea that difference only exists within a binary opposition. For difference to exist, something has to be different from something else, something that is defined as the norm. According to Avtar Brah, questions need to be asked:
How does difference designate the ‘other’? Who defines difference? What are the presumed norms from which a group is marked as being different? What is the nature of attributions that are claimed as characterising a group as different? How are boundaries of difference interiorised in the landscapes of the psyche? How are various groups represented in different discourses of difference? Does difference differentiate laterally or hierarchically? (Brah 1996, p 115)
If difference is ‘that-which-is-not-the-norm’, then defining difference implies defining the norm. To be able to describe the other, it is imperative to describe the self, and if the self is the benchmark, the other, the one who is different, will consequently be at least a divergence from that benchmark. This means that difference is a term that is, as Ang states, value-laden, ascribed by the people who view themselves as the norm. As Castles and Miller assert: “Other-definition means ascription of undesirable characteristics and assignment to inferior positions by dominant groups” (Castles and Miller 2003, p 30). 28
The other and the self need each other; they are interdependent. There is no self-definition, no self-identity, without an other-definition, an other-identity. In terms of the question of migration, as Papastergiadis contends,
The identity of the citizen presupposes the other, the migrant, the exile. Identity emerges, not just from the identification of the common characteristics for those who are included within the nation, but from the more visible difference of those excluded. The national question: ‘who are we?’ is largely answered by declaring: ‘we are not them’ (Papastergiadis 2000, p 59).
Dutton even argues that “The Commonwealth’s creation of a citizenry, of an Australian ‘us’, depended on the deployment of effective means to divide people who belonged to that category from those who did not: on the erection of boundaries between citizens and strangers” (Dutton 2002, p 2). This implies that differences are always constructed and relational. Because they are based on binaries, the oppositions (both the self and the other) are in danger of “being reductionist and over-simplified – swallowing up all distinctions in their rather rigid two-part structure” (Hall 1997, p 235). Difference, then, is converted into otherness, in order to secure the “self- certainty” of the norm (Larbalestier 1999, p 150), and the “marking of difference” is therefore the basis of the “symbolic order”, the way society denotes its “classificatory systems” (Hall 1997, p 236). Gunew quotes Homi Bhabha to say that these oversimplifications produce “‘otherness’ as stereotypes of the fixing of difference. Stereotypes are seen here not simply as false images but as a process of constituting difference as though it were transfixed” (Gunew 1994, p 35). So differences can become clichés, not necessarily related to reality, but to an idea of reality, prescribed by the people in power who construct a story of ‘them and us’. Looking at Australia, Dutton claims that
The architects of Australian civic and migration policies articulated all manner of ideas about how humanity was divided: these ideas never fitted with any coherent or meaningful theory of human differentiation. Nor did these policy- makers always speak in a shared language, for even when they used identical terminology, and this was not often the case, there were sometimes serious discrepancies in their understandings of human difference (Dutton 2002, p 20).
The consequence for Australian multiculturalism, Ang contends, is that now “differences are carefully classified and organized into a neat, virtual grid of distinct ‘ethnic communities’, each with their own ‘culture’” (Ang 2001, p 14), which leads to 29
a measure of “prescribed ‘otherness’” (2001, p 30). The problem with that, according to Bennett, is that it tends “to freeze the fluidity of identity by the very fact that it is concerned with synthesising unruly and unpredictable cultural identities and differences into a harmonious unity-in-diversity” (Bennett 1998, p 157). Internal differences within groups are deemed non-existent, and individuals are necessarily part of a clearly defined group. Seen in this way, multiculturalism turns into cultural separatism, a state of affairs where everyone, regardless of their own identification, is placed within certain rigid categories. This can lead to major confusion. If the migrant has always been, as Castles insists, “the ‘Other’ of the nation” (Castles 2000, p 187), then surely white English- speaking migrants are ‘others’ as well? Not according to Dutton, who writes that “We are largely to blame for the difficulties English migrants encounter in Australia. We tell them we are no different (we can compare bootsoles) and, of course, they speedily find out that we are very different, and they are disappointed” (Dutton in Stratton 1998, p 179). Apparently, British migrants are told, by ‘we’, that they are largely the same, although they are and feel themselves to be migrants, and therefore logically part of the category of others. On the other hand, there are non-migrants, second or tenth generation non-white, sometimes non-English speaking Australians, who should be included in the category ‘us’ or ‘same’ on the basis of their non-migrant status, but are not. All this leads to the conclusion that to be part of the classification ‘different’ means to look and sound different from a white, English-speaking Australia that is constructed as the norm. Hage also notes that difference is joined at the hip with the notion of ‘tolerance’. Seeing “multicultural tolerance” as “a strategy aimed at reproducing and disguising relationships of power in society”, he maintains that it is “a form of symbolic violence, in which a mode of domination is presented as a form of egalitarianism’, and very close to ‘condescension’” (Hage 1998, p 87). “Tolerance”, Hage contends, “presupposes that the object of tolerance is just that: an object of the will of the tolerator” (1998, p 89). Hage argues that White Australia determines who is tolerated, when, and to what level: it also determines when it withdraws its tolerance. Thus, tolerance turns into yet another practice of inclusion and exclusion, based on what is and what is not accepted difference. In Hage’s Australian multicultural fair, difference is tolerated as long as it dishes up food, dancing and music, but it oversteps the boundaries when it encompasses values and identities that 30
deviate from the norm (and even worse if it is vocal or political about that). So not only do ‘we’ decide what difference is, but ‘we’ also determine if and when that difference can be tolerated. Paradoxically, where too much difference is difficult for ‘us’ to accept, so is too little. From an objective standpoint, white, English-speaking migrants from countries like the UK, the US, South-Africa and New Zealand differ from white, English-speaking Australians who were born here. They were raised in a different country, with a different landscape, a (slightly) different language, different values, identities and backgrounds. Moreover, their migrant-experiences have added to their different life-experiences. Besides, the Cornish differ from the Welsh, New Yorkers from people from rural Texas, and even within those groups there are differences. However, in the Australian context, they fall into the category of ‘same’. To steal a description from Stuart Hall, when he is talking about differences within black identity, this is a “sense of difference which is not pure ‘otherness’” (Hall 1990, p 229). This notion of difference is thus deeply unsettling. If the other can look and (almost) sound the same, this poses serious questions not only about the nature of difference, but also about the identity of what is ‘same’. If difference can be so similar, what does that say about ‘us’?
5. White, English-speaking migrant groups in Australia: sibling rivalry?
Sibling rivalry is a complicated issue in families. According to Darwinian theory, “siblings compete to optimize parental investment and hence to get out of childhood alive” (Sulloway 2001, p 40). Within the family dynamics, there are power struggles - between siblings, and between parents and children - with an aim to define roles and identities. People strive for significance, and in the competition that arises from that, there is a difficult mix of love and hostility. On the one hand, kinship and (genetic) commonality pushes parents and children together, while jealousy and the need to assert individuality drives them apart. In the context of group-aggression, Freud made a connection between family relationships and relationships between (parts of) countries that are (culturally and geographically) close, but have differences as well:
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It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds, and in ridiculing each other– like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of ‘the narcissism of minor differences’, a name which does not much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient [sic] and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier (Freud 1930, p 59).
Leaving Freud’s very optimistic assessment of this aggression being “relatively harmless” aside for the moment (Cain and Abel come to mind), this “narcissism of minor differences” might help to explain the relationship between groups of people who are very alike. As psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard sees it, these minor differences are used – and even exaggerated – “in order to maintain a sense of separateness” (Gabbard 1993, p 229) within the individual groups themselves. Again, difference here works within a binary construction: in order to preserve an identity, people need to define themselves against what (and who) they are not. In Australia, there are many groups of people who are (culturally) linked with what is called the core culture. English, Irish, Scottish, Cornish and Welsh all fall within the category ‘Anglo-Celt’, and even other white English-speakers are regularly included, like Americans, New Zealanders, Canadians and South-Africans. But here the (relative) problems start. Take, for example, the Americans. In 1935, when Australia was still ‘Anglo-Saxon’, “the fear of another war encouraged the spread of an ‘English Speaking Union”, “primarily concerned with Anglo-American unity” (Cochrane 1994, p 9). Robert Menzies did not like this idea at all:
We err if we regard the Americans as our blood cousins. The majority of them are not Anglo-Saxons, their language is by no means identical, their appearance is different; their ideas are cruder; their standards are lower; they have no consciousness of responsibility for the well-being and security of the world (Menzies 1935, in Cochrane 1994).
According to Aitchison (1986) and Mosler and Catley (1998), this sentiment set the tone of the relationship between Australians and American migrants to Australia as well. Between the end of the Second World War and 1983, Aitchison states, “it has been estimated that 70.900 immigrants from the USA came to Australia, nearly two percent of the more than 4 million people who arrived in that period” (Aitchison 32
1986, p 1). Aitchison flags “two half-truths” about the “ease of accommodation” among Americans in Australia:
One is that the cultures of these nations are fundamentally similar. They are, of course, but they are quite dissimilar in many ways as well. Many of these differences are much more real than apparent. The second half-truth is that the analogies of the two derive from a shared Anglo-Saxon heritage and common language. This is also, of course, true. However, it is only the beginning of a complex story (ibid).
Mosler and Catley, in one of the very few academic studies into the position of American migrants in Australia, start their analysis by identifying the American migrants as “white, of European ancestry, tertiary-educated, English-speaking, and from an urban background” (Mosler and Catley 1998, p xiv). They claim that “they have come to an Australia, where America understandably appears as a dominant power the strength of whose culture threatens almost the existence of the Australian identity” (1998, p 7). Remembering Gabbard, this sounds like a serious case of sibling rivalry. As Mosler and Catley reason, there is a “cultural ambivalence expressed by both Americans and Australian in their interactions with one another”:
In this period of transition in Australia, from the British imperial political and cultural orbit to that of an independent nation greatly influenced by America, Americans in Australia would be both welcomed for their expertise and vigor and resented for their aggression, arrogance, and threatening presence (1998, p 23).
To put it into terms of family dynamics: now that the children have grown up and the influence of the parent is diminishing, the siblings have started a fight about prominence and importance. Australians, who feel “swamped by American imperial power”, resist this by indulging in what Mosler and Catley maintain is “generalized cultural anti-Americanism” (1998, p 38). They assert that “in the 1990s, hostility to America and Americans has become something of a leitmotif in Australian culture in all social classes and ideological groups and in everyday political and social discourse” (1998, p 108). “The popular image of America and Americans is generally a negative one […] the raised eyebrow and/or knowing smirk of the television newsreader after one of those ‘only in America’ stories: ‘Those crazy Yanks are at it again’” (1998, p 111). 33
Mosler and Catley do a lot to explain the complex status of American migrants in Australia. Firstly, they emphasise that most of their 302 respondents (almost all of them white, as most American migrants to Australia are) do not consider themselves migrants, “on the grounds that ‘migrant’ implied a person of low socio-economic status, someone who had arrived on assisted passage (low status again), and, as is particularly crucial for Americans, a rejection of the Motherland and/or a kind of cultural treason to one’s nationality” (1998, p 66). When Australians treat them as migrants and thus ‘different’, the Americans are annoyed. On the other hand Mosler and Catley quote an American letter-writer, who feels that to be an American in Australia is “not to be taken seriously. That, of course, is exactly the problem. The discrimination that a US immigrant faces in Australia […] is totally unacknowledged” (1998, p 148), mainly because the focus of discrimination is on migrant groups who are more different from the Australians than the Americans. The consequence of this, they argue, is that these migrants have a relative social “invisibility”, which “obscures the full story of [their] migration” (1998, p xiv). Or, to come back to the family dynamics, they are different from their siblings, but measured against the world outside of the family they are similar enough to be the same. Another example of the similarities between family dynamics and differences within Australia is the situation of the British, who are, culturally speaking, both parent and sibling. I will address this more broadly in the chapter on Alex Miller’s work, but as a general introduction a few thoughts might be in order here. In his article on Britishness in Australia, Peter Cochrane starts by identifying the internal family relations within Britain itself. Britishness in Britain emerged, Cochrane claims, when the internal differences were diminished “by a growing sense of likeness and collective interest”. It became an “extended family metaphor”, “the invention of a unifying tradition”, an “allegiance to a single symbolic family”, something which restrained them from too openly resenting one another or resorting to “separate mobilisations of identity” (Cochrane 1996, p 63). This Britishness, Cochrane reasons, had an extraterritorial dimension as well, “uniting Britons wherever they might be in the world”, with “empire as imagined community” (ibid). In Australia, this “was not a simple matter of transplantation”, but “Britishness had to be sustained in unusual, new conditions, it had to be reformulated in a field of relationships that was very different to that in Britain” (ibid). At first, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Britishness, originating in the colonising country, had the guiding light of the parent. There was “a sense of 34
superiority” attached to it, in that it “marked out identity through difference and anchored all sorts of claims to virtue, achievement and destiny deep in history” (1996, p 68). Cochrane marks the end of this period roughly around Menzies’ funeral in 1978. The Second World War had briefly brought back a feeling of “nostalgia” for the British connection, but this “was not sustained”:
With new patterns of immigration, ethnic diversity and a ‘baby boom’ which greatly increased the number of Australians whose forebears in this country went back three generations or more, British identity began to lose its centrality in the culture. ‘Dramatic shifts in self-perception’ came with a resurgence of national feelings and symbols. […] The word ‘Anglo’ became a disparaging abbreviation. […] The media began to routinely define national character in opposition to the ‘British’ (1996, p 72-73).
In short: the child had come of age, discovered its own, separate identity and needed to distance itself from its parent. This process of emancipation was accompanied by a mixture of anger, confusion and relief. As David Malouf asserts, there was “great bitterness on the part of Australia” when Britain became a full member of the European Common Market, because it felt, in some way, betrayed. Still, the consequence of this was that it brought “Australia – the land itself – fully alive at last in our consciousness. As a part of the earth of which we were now the custodians. As soil to be defended and preserved because we were deeply connected to it. As the one place where we were properly at home” (Malouf 2006, p 60). Malouf uses another image of family life when he concludes that “Britain no longer sits at the head of the table. […] The fact is, there is no longer a ‘centre’ around which we circulate and dance. We have all shifted place. The world has turned upside down in terms of where Australia and Britain now stand in relation to one another” (2006, p 66-67). What remains, though, after this “development of a sense of ‘Australian- specific national capital’” (Stratton 2000, p 30), is, as Stratton contends, the idea that the differences between British migrants and the Australian-born are so minor that the two groups are basically the same. This has to be so because it was “needed both for the legitimisation of the origin myth and for the solidarity of British/Anglo-Saxon Australians, and Australian culture, over and against those who were more usually known as New Australians’: ‘non-Anglo migrants’” (2000, p 31):
Against all demonstrations of difference, both the British and the Australians were committed to the claim that British culture and Australian culture were 35
fundamentally the same. Hence, British migrants were supposed to feel at home in Australia immediately. That they didn’t, was an ongoing challenge to the legitimacy of the ideology (2000, p 32).
The ambiguous migrant-status of both Americans and British migrants (and, as I will try to show in the writers’ chapters, South-African and New Zealand migrants as well) leads us to consider the concept of migrancy in general.
6. Migrancy and national identity
As I have stated before, in Australia there is a strong connection between multiculturalism and immigration. The definition of who is or who is not a migrant is therefore important, because it determines who is inside the core and who is at the periphery. On the one hand, most migrants in Australia are now highly skilled workers, who contribute to “Australia’s economic, demographic and social well- being”, as a 2009 DIAC report contends (Department of Immigration 2009, p 23). On the other hand, academic descriptions include categories like non-white, non-English- speaking, other than Anglo-Celtic, ethnic minority, marginalised and disadvantaged. In 2004 Gerry Turcotte published Border Crossings, an investigation into his own position as a Canadian-Australian. He describes the confusion he felt when confronted with the way Australians categorise him:
In Australia, when I published my first work here – in a magazine called Outrider, a journal of migrant writing – I was asked on several occasions, by a number of writers, how dare I publish in such journals? That I wasn’t a real migrant. So that I wondered what fake migrants were – and how I had become one (Turcotte 2004, p 56).
Real and fake migrants: it is an interesting idea, considering the fact that a migrant, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, is simply “someone who migrates”, which means, “to go from one country, region, or place of abode to settle in another” (Macquarie Dictionary online, accessed 5 December 2009). Mark Lopez asserts that in Australia “the term ‘migrant’ refers to an individual or minority group of immigrant, overseas-born non-citizens, and covers recent arrivals and long-term residents” (Lopez 2000, p 4).Yet: what about migrants who belong to a majority group, like British migrants? Nikos Papastergiadis wonders, “if the term ‘migrant’ is confined to those who were born outside the country in which they live, then why, for 36 instance, are the children and grandchildren of migrants in Australia referred to as second- or third-generation migrants?” (Papastergiadis 2000, p 55). There are other definitions, with other problems attached to them, as well. Hammerton and Thomson claim that their ‘Ten Pound Poms’ are usually excluded from the category ‘migrant’, because
When Australians talk about migrants, for the most part they mean migrants from non-English-speaking countries. A parallel argument can be made for Britain, where the focus of interest in the last forty years has been upon black immigrants rather than white emigrants or immigrants (Hammerton and Thomson 2005, p 10).
If that is true, then language (in Australia) and colour (in Britain) are important in defining who is a migrant, as well as, Papastergiadis contends, the idea of the migrant as “‘the marginal man’” (Papastergiadis 2000, p 55). James Jupp claims that there are comparative and historical factors involved:
Working-class English immigrants in the 1920s were visible if only for their cloth caps and malnutrition. But they were much less visible than the ‘reffos’ of the 1940s or the ‘dagos’ of the 1950s. Becoming invisible was thus made easier by the growing multiculturalism, and eventually multiracialism, of post- war Australia (Jupp 2004, p 193).
Historian Bain Atwood, musing about the way the National Museum of Australia portrays migrants, complicates the meaning of the term ‘migrant’ even further. Anglo- Celtic migrants, he insists, are
imagined as a homogenous group of ‘Australians’. More importantly, their foreign-ness is disguised; they are not ‘migrants’, let alone ‘invaders’. Predictably, non-British peoples are cast as the migrants […]. Non-British migrants are to be treated as though they are forever ‘other’ to Australia (Atwood 2004, p 283).
Atwood calls this “the master narrative” (2004, p 283), a form of revisionism in which “any sense of the complex inter-relationships between people and of the making and remaking of a national community is diminished” (2004, p 284). What can be said, then, is that the definition of the term ‘migrant’ is not stable, but more than anything else, it is relational. In that regard, it is interesting to come at it from the other side and look at Catriona Elder’s views on who is and who is not regarded as‘Australian’. Writing about the 2001 furore that followed the Tampa crisis, Elder 37
insists that Australian politicians and public alike discriminate heavily in their assessment of who is allowed to be in this country, and in their treatment of people who are not. While uninvited asylum seekers continue to be the source of much anxiety, and were detained without much protest from the general population,
another group of non-citizens who are in Australia without the proper permission – the 50.000 or more people who have overstayed their visas – are hardly ever detained. As Don McMaster (2001: 68) notes, this is because about twenty per cent of them are British or American tourists who have decided not to go home. These ‘illegals’ are not understood in terms of the ‘invading Asian horde’, and so are not seen as a problem. By comparison, the ‘third world looking’ arrivals are kept in geographically isolated detention centres, their misery operating as a deterrence to ‘others’ who might want to come to Australia (Elder 2007, p 126-127).
Elder reasons that these days the national story is the one that she calls the “we are all immigrants” narrative (2007, p 127), which underpins the multicultural one. It “flattens out the different meanings attached to arriving in Australia over the last few hundred years”, Elder reasons, and “fails to recognise that from the earliest times, there emerged hierarchies and differences between British immigrants –who morphed into the ‘natives’ of the land – and migrants who came from a range of non-British countries – Hage’s (1998) white but not Anglo-Australians” (2007, p 128). In Elder’s view, British migrants are not really migrants, but Australians, while other migrants become less so over time, with “recently arrived migrants […] placed at the bottom of the Australian social-scape” (2007, p 132). Within this concept of Australianness “white or Anglo-Australians still occupy what is considered the normal ethnicity of the nation” (2007, p 139). The simple dictionary definition of a migrant as someone who migrates, seems to have been scrapped here, making way for a rather confusing version of the nation as one where everyone is a migrant and yet only newly arrived, non-white migrants are considered to be so. This obscures both certain (white) migrant stories and the discussion about the consequences of migration in general. If migration is “the quintessential experience of our time”, as Berger contends (Berger 1984, p 55), the analysis of this important global occurrence should be based in clearly defined understandings of the central concepts. I would suggest that Paul Carter (historian, writer, artist and an English migrant to Australia) is right in insisting that “it becomes more than ever urgent to develop a framework of thinking that makes the migrant 38 central, not ancillary, to historical processes” (Carter 1992, p 7-8). Doing that requires adopting definitions of both the migrant and the nation (and the relationship between the two) that are less based in tacitly selective models.
6. Whiteness
There seems to be one issue that connects multiculturalism, ethnicity, race, culture, difference and migrancy: whiteness. Whiteness has been a hotly debated theme in academia since the early 1990s, when, after a long history of African- American writing on this topic (notably by Toni Morrison, in her study Playing in the Dark (1992)), white American and British academics such as Richard Dyer, David Roediger and Ruth Frankenberg started to publish their research. To clarify what came to be known as ‘critical whiteness studies’, Frankenberg’s writing is an interesting starting point. Frankenberg first addressed the question of whiteness in 1993, defining whiteness as “a location of structural advantage, or race privilege. Second, it is a ‘standpoint’, a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society. Third, ‘whiteness’ refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (Frankenberg 1993, p 2). For Frankenberg it was important finally to come to terms with the fact that whiteness was a racial category as well, and not just one of many, but the normative one, the one that positions everybody who is non-white as ‘Other’. Whiteness, in Frankenberg’s view, had mainly negative associations, with concepts like privilege, dominance, supremacy, power, violence and entitlement attached to it. Naming both the colour and its locality, “displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance” (1993, p 6). Four years later, Frankenberg elaborated what she calls the “invisibility” of whiteness, by contending that it “makes itself invisible precisely by asserting its normalcy, its transparency, in contrast with the marking of others on which its transparency depends” (Frankenberg 1997, p 6). The ‘others’ Frankenberg mentions, are mostly positioned in a binary opposition to whiteness: labels like minority, oppressed, victims, dispossessed, abnormal, subordinate and peripheral are used frequently, and from this Frankenberg insists that
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Other issues are being worked through under the surface of this new discourse [of whiteness]. One is whether white people and white culture are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Here, we see a displacement of practical and material questions about white people’s location in racial hierarchy onto very static notions of essence and original sin. It follows naturally from this displacement that whites would embark urgently on the quest either to be proven innocent or to find redemption (1997, p 18).
This assessment is echoed that same year by Dyer, who argues that in response to the relatively new notion that whiteness and white people have very real responsibilities that are the result of their colour and consequent position of power, some white people almost flaunt their guilt. “The display of our guilt is our Calvary”, he writes (Dyer 1997, p 11). Dyer also flags other reactions, notably one he calls “me-too-ism”, “a feeling that, amid all this (all this?) attention being given to non-white subjects, white people are being left out” (1997, p 10). Talking about whiteness in terms of violence, Dyer emphasises, makes white people nervous and angry. He quotes bell hooks:
Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of ‘sameness’, even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think (hooks 1992, p 167, in Dyer 1997, p 2).
Such universalist humanism prompts Frankenberg four years later to change her mind about whiteness as an unmarked category:
It is indeed one with which I myself worked for a number of years. The more one scrutinizes it, however, the more the notion of whiteness as unmarked norm is revealed to be a mirage or indeed, to put it even more strongly, a white delusion. […] In fact, whiteness is in a continual state of being dressed and undressed, of marking and cloaking. […] Suddenly, the notion that whiteness might be invisible seems bizarre in the extreme (Frankenberg 2001, p 73-76).
Instead, Frankenberg starts to focus on colonialism and imperialism to point to the reasons for our continual thinking in terms of race. Race, she affirms, has always been used to legitimize colonization: “In the colonial context, the naming of ‘cultures’ and ‘peoples’ was very much linked to naming and marking out a host of Others as beings deemed lesser than the ‘national’ Selves who sought to dominate them” (2001, p 74- 75). Such lesser masses could be surveyed from the eminence of superior selfhood 40 then, but what white people have to realise now, Frankenberg declares, is that these Others have always been looking at them as well. Furthermore, they have been seeing them as ‘white’. Also, feeling guilt or pity is not only not our Calvary, as Dyer said, but yet another manifestation of apparent superiority. Critiquing David Roediger’s description of “a slave on the auction block, awaiting sale” (2001, p 77), Frankenberg asserts that
The depiction of the oppressed or wounded Other as suffering body first and seeing mind second is central to a history of the enlistment of ostensibly wiser, more conscious, more civilized, whiter Selves. It travels from records of colonial officials and missionaries at the funeral pyres of satis committed in India all the way to advertisements for Third World-focussed charitable organizations in today’s Sunday newspapers (2001, p 78).
According to Frankenberg’s reasoning, it is this “liberal pity” that “keeps intact the Self-Other binary and offers no insight into the Self’s self-designated authority and sanctity” (2001, p 80). Therefore Frankenberg advocates a wider interpretation of the word whiteness, “to examine its co-constitution with nationality, class, ethnicity, and culture” (2001, p 82). Doing that would invariably lead to looking at whiteness as “pertinent to the study of racial formation” (2001, p 87), and would use history to delve deeper into the issue of “racial namings of people and groups” (2001, p 82). While still stressing that “whiteness is a location of structural advantage in societies structured in racial dominance” (2001, p 76), five of the eight definitions Frankenberg comes up with to describe whiteness at this time, are related to an idea of “white as an unstable category”, where people can be categorised as non-white one day and white the next. Whiteness, she stresses, “is a product of history, and is a relational category. Like other racial locations, it has no inherent but only socially constructed meanings. As such, [they] […] may appear simultaneously malleable and intractable” (ibid). Also, “Inclusion within the category ‘white’ is often a matter of contestation, and in different times and places some kinds of whiteness are boundary markers of the category itself” (ibid). Frankenberg never got to finish her last book, Fluent in Whiteness, because she died in 2007. Others heeded her call, though, and research into this phenomenon has since been at the forefront of academic discussions on whiteness. Richard Dyer had already flagged ‘white’ as an unstable category in history, and in describing how this process works, American Matthew Frye Jacobson’s study into the sliding scales 41
of white in the US is interesting as well. Here, Frye Jacobson maintains that groups entering the USA have become “Caucasians only over time” (Frye Jacobson 1999, p 3), usually after their “racial pedigree” had “faced certain challenges along the way” (1999, p 4). He concludes that “Caucasians are made and not born”, simply because of the fact that “races are invented categories – designations coined for the sake of grouping and separating peoples along lines of presumed difference” (1999, p 4-5). One of the examples he uses to support this theory is that of the Catholic Irish, who, “in 1877 could be a despised Celt in Boston – a threat to the republic – and yet a solid member of The Order of Caucasians for the Extermination of the Chinaman in San Francisco, gallantly defending US shores from an invasion of ‘Mongolians”’ (1999, p 5). After the Irish, all manner of other groups were “whitened” in the USA: Armenians, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, confirming Frankenberg’s view that ‘white’ is not only an unstable category, but one that changes over time. Jon Stratton builds on Frye Jacobson’s theory and transfers it to the Australian situation. His assumption is that the reason why the Irish, previously considered inferior and “a kind of white Negroes” (Stratton 2004, p 231), became acceptably white, was that the concept of a unified Australian nation took hold towards the end of the nineteenth century, and whitening the Irish helped “to produce a claimed homogeneous white nation” (2004, p 229). The Irish needed to be included, Stratton says, “to put in place a unified protection against the incursions of Chinese, and ‘Asiatics’ generally” (2004, p 234): whitening was therefore not used to include the Irish, but to exclude others who were deemed even less white. In Australia, Jon Stratton lamented in 1999, “there is, still, remarkably little work on the construction of the racial category of ‘white’” (Stratton 1999, p 163), in contrast to the US, where “white hegemony has been much more seriously challenged and unsettled than in Australia” (ibid). According to Stratton, the shift, in the early 1970s, from “a reductive and determinist understanding of race to one which understands race as suggesting membership of a particular cultural grouping” (1999, p 164), has, in a way, suppressed a discourse about colour and power. In Australia, especially during multiculturalism, the discussion is not about ‘race’ per se, but about “continent-based definitions of race (European, Asian, African) which signify claimed cultural groupings” (ibid). “Whiteness”, in the practice of multiculturalism, “is abstracted into a claim about European moral assumptions, and this claim is articulated in terms of acceptable moral difference” (1999, p 165). European morality, 42
Stratton maintains, is now equated with Christianity, something, it is assumed, all white people share, and something which distinguishes them from ethnic groups “that are thought of as racially” and morally different (1999, p 166). Therefore, “In Australia, ethnicity is defined by national origin” (1999, p 170), and from the time of multiculturalism, “white” has disappeared as a “classificatory term. Instead, ‘mainstream’, ‘real Australians’, and most commonly, ‘Anglo-Celtic’”, “were used” to denote “people who are simply presumed to be white” (1999, p 172). For Stratton, the consequence of this apparent blindness to race means that multiculturalism “can do nothing to counter racism” (1999, p 179). Because the designation makes a connection between culture and morality on the one hand, and national origin on the other, to, for instance, a Christian Asian it “is not enough to overcome the assumption of a moral difference signified by the person’s visual difference from what remains the white Australian norm” (1999, p 180). Therefore, in order to have a real discussion about whiteness in Australia, “official multiculturalism must [first] recognise its white mono-morality” (1999, p 182). If talking about whiteness, as I understand Stratton, is being obstructed by the language of multiculturalism, where the classifications try to avoid mentioning colour and power, then it is understandable that critical whiteness studies are only tentatively explored in Australia. Instead, it seems that, as Fiona Nicoll argues, “the language of whiteness and race […] has been euphemistically transposed into the language of sovereignty” (Nicoll 2005, p 1), where
Powerful nations dominated by white Christian men have authorised themselves to violate the sovereignty of others, not in the name of whiteness and Christianity, but, rather, in the name of ‘freedom’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘democracy’: values that would seem impossible to contest or refuse. To put questions of whiteness and race back into focus, then, it is necessary to ask: which categories of people and which nations are excluded from the key debates and decisions about sovereignty that are reconfiguring economic, military, political and cultural relations all over the globe? (ibid).
Whiteness, here, has turned into a kind of moral superiority, used against others who have to be either rescued or fought, in order to assimilate them into the ‘right’ cultural value system. This, to me, sounds like colonialism by a different name, and without the explicit mentioning of race as a motivating factor. Of course, as Nicoll notes, the categories and nations that are excluded are almost always non-white. On the other side of the obscured whiteness discussion is the issue of Indigenous “counter 43
narratives and sovereignty claims” (2005, p 3), in Australia the usual battlefield of whiteness studies. Here, the same moral superiority applies, with Australian politics focussing on “practical reconciliation”, which in practice looks a lot like what Nicoll calls a “white sovereignty’s patriarchal model of state that has the assimilation of all others as its final solution” (2005, p 4). “Rather than reflecting values of Aboriginal sovereignty”, it is “based on hierarchy, patriarchy and entrenched colonialism” (ibid), usually formulated as a kind of tough love, imposed on Aboriginal groups ‘for their own good’. What ‘their’ own good is, is, of course, decided by ‘us’, who are part of the core culture. ‘Us’, in John Howard’s definition, is a group called, mystifyingly, ‘ordinary Australians’, and there is, Carol Johnson argues, “an implicit, but never to be explicitly spelt out, assumption that ordinary Australians are not Aboriginal, Asian, homosexual, lesbian, feminists, or migrants” (Johnson 2007 (2000), p 69). Which, again, is shorthand for ‘anything but white’, although, again, race or ethnicity are never mentioned. Talking about whiteness in Australia, is, therefore, difficult, because the definitions of the term have been obscured by associations with, amongst others, culture and morality. This takes the sting out of a possible debate about the power of whiteness, and turns it into a discussion about something like ‘degrees of civilization’ (of course viewed from a white moral framework, but not designated like that). Removing whiteness from debates about race, colour and power, has made not only whiteness invisible, but has created the power inequities as well. Furthermore, it has also obscured a clearer view on more complex or multiple white identities and problematised an understanding of what terms like race, colour, multiculturalism, ethnicity etc. actually mean. This lack of clarity and its consequences inform my subsequent analysis of the work of writers who are at the same time part of a site of privilege and power (white, English-speaking, culturally similar) and part of the periphery (migrant).
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CHAPTER 3
THE HISTORY OF MIGRANT, ETHNIC, AND MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE IN AUSTRALIA
1. 1963-1979
Following on from the above work, I would like now to show how the same difficulties are evident in literary-critical debates about migrant writing in Australia. It is considered a truism that Australian history, and therefore also Australian literature, is primarily concerned with migrancy. “Migration”, Delys Bird contends, “has been a significant feature of Australia’s European history (indeed, it is a history of migration) and has marked its literature” (Bird in Bennett et al 1998, p 35). From the 1988 Penguin New Literary History of Australia to the 2009 Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, there has been an acknowledgement that “Australia has from the beginning […] been the outer equivalent of an inner reality […] of exile […] and of newness and freedom […] a condition of life [that] loomed large in the consciousness of her white invaders” (Jose quoting Judith Wright 2009, p 1). Focussing for the purpose of this thesis on non-Aboriginal writing in Australia, it seems fair to say that the early visitors to this country, both forced and voluntary, were largely preoccupied with the consequences of the difference between their countries of birth and this new one. As Gelder and Salzman argue: “In the nineteenth century, writers themselves, as well as their works, drifted between the reassurance of England and the challenges of a strange new world” (Gelder and Salzman 1989, p 187). From the officers arriving with the First Fleet, who “were busy writing their accounts of the new land” (Webby in Jose 2009, p 15), as well as describing their personal experiences in letters home, to later visitors like Charles 45
Rowcroft, who, in 1843 published Tales of the Colonies; or, the Adventures of an Emigrant, (predominantly) white, English-speaking (temporary) migrants sought to put their changed lives into words. The focus in many of these accounts was on the comparison between England or Ireland, and Australia: the different landscape, the struggle to survive, the confrontation with Indigenous peoples, the climate. The audience was mainly British, and the writing was aimed at giving the people ‘back home’ a little insight into lives lived on the other side of the world. Elizabeth Webby asserts:
Today nineteenth-century Australian authors are read for their vivid, individual responses to the challenge and fascination of their often new and strange circumstances, and their remarkable achievements in the face of many obstacles. Through their work the foundations of Australian literature were established (2009, p 21).
Understandably, the more people were born in the new country, the more the literature they wrote shifted from a comparison between here and there to issues that were more grounded in here than there. Australia itself became the focus, and with it questions of legitimacy, the nation, modernity and destiny emerged. Literature by and about migrants and their experience became less important than the more pressing topic of ‘Australia’ and where it was going. Of course, writers also responded to ‘normal’ preoccupations like war, relationships, changing gender roles, politics, family and race relations. The next big ‘wave’ of literature by migrants was inspired by the Post-War migration. One of the very first anthologies bringing together, in this case, short stories by writers about migrancy, was Louise Rorabacher’s Two Ways Meet – Stories of Migrants in Australia, in 1963. It is interesting to note that Rorabacher, herself defined in the AustLit database as a ‘visitor’ from the USA, incorporates more stories about migrants by established resident Australians in her book than stories on migration by migrants themselves. Only David Martin (Hungary), John Morrison (New Zealand), Judah Waten (Ukraine), F.B. Vickers (England), June Factor (Poland) and Neilma Sidney (USA) are migrants in the dictionary-sense of the word. Yet Rorabacher distinguishes a “single theme – here, a social one limited to the problems surrounding the immigrant in Australia”, adding that “Fiction in general has long been recognized as a useful source of social history. It records the minutiae of everyday living with a thoroughness that no other literary type can rival; it is equally quick to reflect social change, sometimes even attempting 46 to direct it” (Rorabacher 1963, p 9). In taking this position, Rorabacher sets up the subsequent trend of reading migrant stories mainly as sociological commentary rather than literature in its own right. Because Two Ways Meet is an early attempt to look at the migrant experience, it might be valuable to determine in more detail what Rorabacher’s reasons were to bring these particular short stories together. Writing at a time when Australia’s policy towards migrants was still firmly rooted in assimilation, Rorabacher characterises her collection as “‘melting pot’ stories” (1963, p 10). Labelling Australia and America as “two daughters of one mother” (England), Rorabacher views their history of migration as similar, with America, “the elder sister” (Ibid), a little ahead in time. “Fiction”, to Rorabacher, is “an avenue of understanding. Figures satisfy the mind; fiction appeals to the heart”. “For here we find not the large facts but what they meant to small individuals; not the relative numbers of people but the kinds of life that those people created and endured” (1963, p 13). Rorabacher also flags the themes that she reads in stories on the “migratory process: the untenable past, the uprooting, the hope, the homesickness, the painful adjustments, the bitter disappointments, the ultimate successes and failures”, and the idea that the consequence of assimilation is “that natives do not absorb newcomers without being somewhat changed by them”, “in manpower, in cultural patterns, in breadth of understanding” (1963, p 14). Interestingly, Rorabacher identifies an “increasing literary interest in the whole migrant problem – proof of fiction’s sensitivity to social change” (Ibid). The anthology is aimed at being a vehicle both for furthering this interest, and taking a stand against the “antagonism towards immigrants” that Rorabacher thinks “still exists in some portions of the native population”: “let it be noted that whatever devils of prejudice the authors feel compelled to report, they themselves are ranged conspicuously on the side of the angels” (1963, p 19). Rorabacher was right in marking an increase in the attention to writing by migrants and about migration. As Bird contends, especially from the early 1970s onwards, there was “a new recognition that Australian society was not homogeneous, but made up of many groups with competing interests and political claims, each seeking a cultural space, [which] influenced the fictional preferences of publishers and readers” (Bird in Webby et al 2000, p 183). Lever adds to this that
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Instead of the old ideal of writing as a means of creating community and even nationhood, critical and writing practices have emerged which seek out marginality and difference. In place of unifying political programs in which writers could participate, a series of political interest groups has emerged since the 1960s which at various times has demanded attention for the voices of, for example, women, migrants, Aborigines, gay men or lesbian women (Lever in Bennett et al 1998, p 310-311).
Ken Gelder, both in his contribution to the 1988 Penguin New Literary History of Australia and in his book written with Paul Salzman, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970-1988, stresses that “recent writing in Australia has presented the voices of other marginalised groups within Australia: the migrant voice, for example” (1988, p 504), while also focussing attention on the positioning of these migrants:
by the mid twentieth-century, there was an Anglo-Saxon Australian culture against which the wave of post World War Two migrants were forced to define themselves. In the 1950s a considerable body of literature about European migration appeared, produced by writers like David Martin or Judah Waten. But since the 1970s, a different social perspective on immigration has had its effect on the literature, which now tends to be by migrants, as well as about them (Gelder and Salzman 1989, p 187).
This different social perspective was in part due to the introduction of the Australian Multiculturalism Policy. From the end of the 1970s, a raft of anthologies and other publications concerned with migration were published, and the issue of what was subsequently called ‘migrant’, ‘ethnic’, or ‘multicultural’ writing, began to attract greater scholarly attention. By looking at some of the most influential titles and the discussions they sparked, it is possible to chart the developing thinking about literature and migrancy. It is also interesting to note that the parameters of what constitutes this kind of writing, and the writers who are included in it, change over time. Lolo Houbein, a migrant from Holland, embarks on a long-term project in 1976, when she compiles her first edition of Ethnic Writings in English from Australia, as part of the Adelaide A.L.S. Working Papers of the University of Adelaide. That first volume lists 26 writers, all migrants. The second issue, in 1978, has the names of 65 migrant writers in it, while the third one (1984) records 130 writers, all of whom had actually migrated to Australia at one stage in their lives. In this last publication, all but two of the writers come from non-English speaking countries. The two exceptions, Alma Aldrette (from the USA, a.k.a. Alma Aldrete) and Rosemary Lee-Wright (from the 48
UK), have a non-English speaking background. Aldrette is listed as having Mexican- Indian parentage, while Lee-Wright is said to have a “Gypsy father and a Giorgio [sic] mother”. In her introduction, Houbein delineates the writers as “migrants” (Houbein 1984, p 1), “non-native speakers” (1984, p 2) and “ethnic writers” (ibid), without elaborating on what “ethnic” means. What she does contend is that “the ethnic writer has things to say which can be said better by him or her than by the Australian writer of Anglo-Saxon background” (ibid), again without qualifying this claim. At about the same time Houbein compiles her bibliographies, Andrew Dezsery takes the next step in regards to migrant literature, by launching The First Multilingual Anthology in English and Other than English (1979). This is a remarkable book, especially for the Australian market, in that most of the stories are presented in the foreign language they were originally written in, accompanied by their English translation. In contrast to Rorabacher’s book, all but one of the authors (and she is Aboriginal!) are migrants or long-time visitors to Australia themselves. After a period of Australians writing about migrancy, apparently the time had come for migrants to tell their own stories. Furthermore, there is only one author for whom English is his native language: Michael Riordan, born in the US. The rest are Europeans with a different first language: Italians, Dutch, Germans and a lot of Eastern Europeans; Hungarians (like Dezsery himself), Poles, Croatians, Serbs and Estonians. The tone of the book also differs from Rorabacher’s. Instead of presenting migrancy as a problem, Deszery focuses on “impressions, feelings and hopes” (Deszery 1979, p vii), and takes great care in showing appreciation and gratitude towards the “men and women who let me come to Australia”, who “lent me my first campbed”, and “gave me my first contract as a cleaner” (1979, p viii). He also gives the preface to Al Grassby, at that time Commissioner for Community Relations. Although Grassby acknowledges that “it is still necessary for us to break out of the closed colonial society which has kept us in isolation for so long” (1979, p 5), and does not mince his words in talking about Australia as a “cultural desert made sterile by a colonial system interested […] to serve the altars of imperial hegemony” (1979, p 3), the general tenor of his introduction is one of optimism and celebration. He uses terms like “cultural revolution”, an “awakening by publishers” to the new “multicultural society”, and even heralds an “Australian renaissance” (1979, p 1-2). There is a new inclusiveness, according to Grassby, that goes beyond forced 49
assimilation, and encourages “Australians by choice” (1979, p 1) to maintain, and even celebrate, “their own cultural and artistic heritage” (1979, p 5). Grassby argues that Australians, “as the newest people on earth”, are in a position to “build the most successful national family yet created”, and “this anthology is an act of faith that we will do it right and that the cultural revolution is necessary to transform the old isolations into a unity in diversity which will continue until Australia reaches its full cultural flowering as an example to the world” (1979, p 6). On the last page of the anthology, Dezsery, not just an author, but also the head of Dezsery Ethnic Publications, calls on other “ethnic writers living in Australia” (1979, p 189) to send in their work for the next edition. His invitation concentrates on authors writing in a language other than English, the “silent voices of Australia”, whose “messages in prose, verse or drama will be the real mirror where the face of our community will appear” (ibid).
2. 1980-1990
These two focus-points, ‘languages other than English’, and literature that is concerned with “mirroring” the ‘ethnic’ “community”, maybe even striving for “unity in diversity”, will turn out to be the bedrock of what is considered migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing. Writers who have migrated to Australia, but have an English- language background, soon become a rarity in books by or about the migrant condition. There is no longer a distinction between migrants and non-migrants, but between ‘ethnics’ and either ‘Anglo-Saxons’ or ‘Anglo-Celts’, who are presumed to have no ethnicity, and apparently also no migrant status. To be included into the category of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writer, there are a few criteria people have to adhere to. Firstly, Sneja Gunew, one of the most important academic voices in this debate (at the time a Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Deakin University, and herself a migrant from Germany), points to ‘difference’. In 1983, she writes:
Don’t certain folkloric puppets glide easily into one’s memory in the space reserved for migrants? For most New Australians growing up now and after the Second World War, wasn’t the acknowledgement of their difference palpably recognised in a song and dance act in some school auditorium? (Gunew 1983, p 18). 50
Difference, and more to the point, performable difference, is, Gunew states, an important part of “the process whereby the culture constructs” migrants (1983, p 19), which might, in part, explain why white, English-speaking migrants, who are less in a position to ‘prove’ their difference (maybe with the exception of the occasional bout of Morris dancing or singing Irish shanty songs), have fallen out of the category. Two years later, though, it becomes clear that even the ‘ethnics’ themselves have made a conscious choice about who is inside and who is outside the classification migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writer. In 1985, Peter Skrzynecki (a migrant writer from Germany/Poland) introduces his anthology of multicultural writing, Joseph’s Coat, by defiantly declaring that he expects “criticism at demonstrating how the collection ‘discriminates’ against one group of writers; how it isolates the so-called ‘ethnics’ and doesn’t include writers from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds” (Skrzynecki 1985, p 13). Skrzynecki makes it clear that he doesn’t care, because he is convinced that language is the defining feature here: “Whether they are Aboriginal, whether they are first or second generation immigrants, all the writers here have or had a basic language other than English” (ibid). The act of migration, therefore, no longer seems important as a criterion for inclusion and neither is the story of migrancy. Language, whether ‘born’ abroad or in Australia itself, has become the way to pinpoint difference. “If there has been discrimination”, Skrzynecki emphasises, “it has been against people such as these because they were ‘different’ – because they spoke a foreign language and were unwilling to sever the roots from which they grew” (ibid). As an aside, I would like to mention that, again, the tone has changed in this anthology, compared to Rorabacher’s and Dezsery’s. Skrzynecki’s introduction is both angry (“Often they were tolerated, politely and formally, but this was nothing more than condescension” (Ibid)), and rebellious: “if Joseph’s Coat incurs the displeasure of the bigots, then that’s their misfortune: they are still living in an irretrievable past” (1985, p 14). Clearly, the cap- in-hand era is over, with ‘ethnics’ now not hoping to attract attention, but demanding it. Gunew herself, a few years earlier, had already noted the importance of language in a group she then still called “migrant story-tellers”. In her collection for a Narrative Course at Deakin University, published as Displacements: Migrant Story- Tellers in 1982, she points to the connection between language and thought: “the way we think is entirely produced by the language in which we think” (Gunew 1985 51
(1982), p 1), she claims. “It is languages that speak us. Ask any migrant” (ibid). What intrigues me, is that although Gunew reasons that “any experience of migration or resettlement always produces degrees of disorientation”, her focus is only on “writings by migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds” (ibid), thereby ignoring the “any” and “always” of English-speaking migrants. Whatever the criteria of inclusion were, in the 1980s there was a (re)new(ed) recognition of writing by migrant, ethnic, and multicultural authors. In 1982, Lolo Houbein writes:
The apparent rise of ethnic literature coincides of course with the ‘ethnic bandwagon’ phenomenon, promoted by governments to take the lid off boiling cauldrons of frustrations, and by other levels of society for reasons ranging from genuine interest in other cultures and ‘fair go’ philosophy to plain self- interest where jobs and grants are concerned (Houbein 1982, p 86).
Houbein bases her views on the rise of not just the anthologies, but also the by then 70 newspapers printed in foreign languages, and radio-stations broadcasting in 37 languages. Furthermore, as Grassby asserts in 1979, the Community Arts Board, part of the Australia Council, took the initiative to develop “a program directed to what are quaintly called ‘migrant groups’ to encourage their integration […] so there is a recognition of ‘ethnic arts”’ (Grassby in Dezsery 1979, p 5). Grassby has to admit, however, that the cash involved was “much less than 0.05% of the total budget of the Australia Council” (ibid), and Houbein too, stresses the leading role of community groups and individuals (Houbein 1982, p 86), not the government. Things were about to change, though. In 1984, the Australia Council Literature Board sponsors the establishment of Outrider Magazine, a publication featuring “ethnic” writing. In addition to this,
With editor Jim Davidson at the helm from 1974 to 1982, Meanjin worked towards a more inclusive understanding of Australian literature, and began to publish writers such as Ania Walwicz and Dimitris Tsaloumas […]. In 1983, when Judith Brett took on the editorship, Meanjin released a special edition dealing with immigration and culture […] to demonstrate its commitment to the promotion of ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ writing (Raschke 2005, p 98).
Whether this attention is part of a trend, an attempt to include, or, as, Rashke 52
calls it, “a short-lived outburst of tokenism” (2005, p 91), the categorisations do not become much clearer. In 1988, when Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin publish Beyond the Echo – Multicultural Women’s Writing, most of their writers are either migrants with a non-English speaking background, second or third generation ‘ethnics’ whose parents had a non-English speaking background, or Aboriginal. Again, here ‘migrant’ is conflated with ‘non-English speaking background’, thereby glossing over the migrants who arrived in Australia from the UK, North-America, New Zealand and South Africa, for instance. Also, the editors see no real difference between the “cultural baggage” (Gunew and Mahyuddin 1988, p xiii) of a migrant in the dictionary-sense of the word, and of those second- or third generation ‘ethnics’, who are, I would propose, in between cultures in a very distinct way. One might also question what is considered Anglo-Celtic, and why it is presented as a homogenous term. And then there is the matter of the inclusion of Aboriginal writers, who have now, apparently, become part of the category ‘multicultural’ as well. In their introduction, Gunew and Mahyuddin contend that
The term ‘multicultural’ is the most recent in a long line of terms denoting otherness: New Australian, reffo, wog, migrant, ethnic. Its current meaning has little to do with the experience of actual migration, though it is often reduced to that, to being a remedial term suggesting that those who belong to the multicultural world have problems with language, employment, etc. What multicultural usually refers to is non-Anglo-Celtic, that is, Australians from the UK and Ireland are not designated as part of multiculturalism, nor are they perceived as partaking of ethnicity. Instead of indicating a deficiency in English (a minus), non-Anglo-Celticism should be seen as English plus, the plus referring to varying awareness of languages in addition to English. Inevitably, because positioned differently, those multicultural perspectives on living in Australia as a non-Anglo-Celt differ from traditional views of being Australian (1988, p xviii).
Although Gunew and Mahyuddin appear to be critical of this usage of ‘multicultural’, their collection conforms to what they describe. Theory and practice do not necessarily seem to match here. One thing is clear: the actual fact of migration is no longer a determinant in deciding what is now called ‘multicultural’ literature. In a way, to paraphrase Gunew and Mahyuddin, to be part of this category, somebody has to be a “migrant plus”: somebody with a non-English speaking, non-Anglo-Celtic background, who is also, preferably, not white or male.
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At the end of the 1980s, some writers who are part of the migrant, ethnic, or multicultural categories, start to revolt openly against this classification. Jessica Raschke, in her 2005 thesis Riding the ‘Ethnic Bandwagon’: Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Cultural Difference in Australian Publishing and Literature, quotes from a 1989 interview with George Papaellinas, a second generation Greek-Australian writer, who warns anybody “against calling me a ‘multicultural’ or an ‘ethnic’. Both are euphemisms for ‘the other’. ‘Multicultural’ only serves to describe a policy, and in common with other policies of the government, it exists only in rhetoric” (Papaellinas in Raschke 2005, p 9). As Raschke interprets Papaellinas’ statements further on in the interview, what he is arguing is that “Writers […] are not to be considered according to their age, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. Rather, it is their work that provides the fodder for deliberation, and any ancillary means of assessment is a meandering into irrelevance” (2005, p 10). “Should a writer’s cultural background be employed to describe or promote them, it becomes a dangerous step toward condoning government rhetoric, and, at worst, an act of discrimination” (ibid). Furthermore, Raschke reasons, “the diversity that is displayed among writers and writing classified as ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ quickly renders the terms as inaccurate”: the writers “display a variety of thematic concerns in their writing, from tales of the diaspora, the migrant experience, to love, horror or science-fiction stories. There may be few similarities between them” (2005, p 10-11). “This renders the terms both limited and limiting” (ibid). There are also, Raschke claims, “negative connotations” attached to the terms, such as “stereotyping, exoticism, favouritism, tokenism, discrimination and positive discrimination” (ibid). This leads her to the conclusion that
It is not surprising that writers deemed ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ rarely appreciate the nomination. At best, writers usually dismiss being labelled as a minor annoyance, or as patronising or discriminatory. At worst, writers regard it as derogatory, or as an occurrence that only consolidates what feels like their already disenfranchised and marginalised position in relation to Australia’s predominantly ‘white’ or ‘Anglo’ publishing and literary establishment (2005, p 12).
In 1989, Gelder and Salzman also state that they feel that “multiculturalism [has been] turned into a political football”, with one result being “the reductive approach to the whole question of cultural positioning being debated within multicultural writing itself” (Gelder and Salzman 1989, p 196). I think it is important to state here that in 54
the context of this thesis, I recognise the prejudicial confinement of migrant writing to sociological comment. I understand the need for these critics to seek to de-link writing from its social and historical context almost as an act of emancipation and coming of age of migrant writing as literature. However, in re-linking the literature by white, English-speaking migrant writers to its context, one of my objectives is to show that ignoring themes of migrancy because of the writer’s presumed background can be equally prejudicial, and risks overlooking aspects of the writing that are important.
Regardless of the mounting critique, by this time migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing has become an ‘industry’. As Elizabeth Webby already predicted in 1983, the “trend in Australian writing – and publishing – away from the dominance of people called John, Peter, Alan, Patrick, Hal and Frank and towards a more equitable representation of people with names like Serge and Angelo and Ania”, had led to “a market for their work; this is to some extent a self-perpetuating phenomenon” (Webby 1983, p 40). In 1988, the Penguin New Literary History of Australia is the first of its kind to include writers from elsewhere. After mentioning writers from Germany, Dalmatia, Holland, Korea, Greece, Hungary, Russia and Poland, Bruce Bennett declares that
These authors all write from the perceived ‘edges’ of Australian culture. But publication has placed them in a wider community of letters, where their frequent images of dislocation may reach an Australian population of readers which is recognising its changing composition and mobility (Bennett in Hergenhan et al 1988, p 441).
Thematically, Bennett maintains, these writers do not differ all that much from non- migrant writers. Their concerns are with “prison, desert and sanctuary; all are traditional images, but contemporary migrant experience lends them peculiar force” (1988, p 442-3). Another sign that migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing has become visible and even profitable at this time, is that it has become ‘en vogue’ in both governmental and academic thinking. In 1989 Gunew is appointed the first chair of the Australia Council’s Multicultural Advisory Committee, and its Literature Board starts channelling part of its funding towards the writers who are presumed to be in this category. In 1988, Elaine Lindsay of the Australia Council tells the audience at the Sydney Dis/Unities conference that the Council’s role is to provide “arts for a 55
multicultural society” (Raschke 2005, p 198). 1990 sees Gunew publish ‘Postmodern Tensions’, an essay in Meanjin, in which she takes a closer look at the categorisations and the subsequent positioning of the writers in question. Her prism is postmodernism, which, as she claims, “usually conjures up the spectre of decentred subjects and of the non- or self-referentiality of language. Both have serious implications for those of us who are promoting the claims of the writings of marginal groups” (Gunew 1990, p 21-22). Leaving an analysis of the additional criterion of “marginal groups” aside for the moment, Gunew’s analysis of the relationship between postmodernism and migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature is an interesting one. After stating that “it is important to note that postmodernism differs depending on where one is positioned” (1990, p 22), Gunew contends that “the recognition of ‘ethnicity’ as a category of difference […] serves as a safeguard against the development of imperialisms or ‘nationalisms’ in the worst sense” (1990, p 25). What ‘ethnic’ groups are doing, Gunew declares, is not “merely […] telling stories, but […] legitimating these stories in the wider sphere and […] allowing them to redefine discourses of nationalism and identity” (ibid). It is, therefore, only by listening to the ‘ethnic’ stories that the core gets to know and, maybe, change itself. This way, these stories serve as the core’s (guilty) conscience, a confrontation with the rights and wrongs of its (cultural) content. On this theoretical premise, Gunew builds her critique of the way migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature has been dealt with, for instance in the previously mentioned Penguin New Literary History of Australia. What Bruce Bennett does, Gunew argues, is position the themes that “migrant writers” are concerned with as “reinforcing the familiar, or as repeating the themes of the first settlers” (1990, p 26). In short: these writers have got nothing new to say; the only thing they are doing is harking back to a past that every non- Aboriginal Australian recognises: their own migration (-history). But reading this particular kind of literature as harking back to the past, Gunew reasons, is simply missing the point. There is no nostalgia in these writings; engagement with the past occurs only as “taking issue with prior representations of one’s position” (ibid). Basically, Gunew argues that Bennett and his colleagues are positioning these writings as a ‘safe’ little extra addition to Australian literature, instead of a critique of it, and even of the core itself. “Studies on Australian literature do not generally entertain the idea of ‘migrant writing’ as a dangerous supplement (in Derrida’s sense) that redefines the whole domain. Perhaps they do not entertain it precisely because it 56
has that potential power” (1990, p 28). To solve this problem, Gunew proposes to break down the “category ‘migrant writing’”, “at the very least to distinguish it from non-Anglo-Celtic writing. Once this happens, the old themes and figures no longer comprise the familiar narrative economies” (ibid): “the seemingly familiar themes of ‘exile’, loss or displacement do not simply return as the same when produced by specific cultural groups” (1990, p 29). Also, the normative comparative should not be the core culture against which everything else is measured. What needs to happen is reading “for cultural difference in a non-binary manner”; instead of looking at this literature as a “supplement”, which “redefine[s] the whole”, we should see the ‘ethnic’ voice for what it is, whatever that is. We should read it not within the Australian context, but within its own (ibid). It seems to me that Gunew has changed her mind here; compared to her earlier definitions of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing, and compared to Gunew’s opening statement that we are dealing here with “writings of minority groups”. For one, a ‘group’ implies a ‘unified voice’, as well as some kind of ‘membership’, be it official or unofficial. ‘Minority’, as well, denotes the existence of a ‘majority’, which seems to undermine Gunew’s call for a non- binary-style reading. The biggest problem, though, is that to be able to use the “potential power” to redefine the core, it seems valuable and even necessary to first identify who is doing the critiquing. It is my position that somebody who has physically migrated has a different story to tell (about themselves as well as about Australia) than somebody who was born here but has migrant heritage. Also, because their relationship with the core is different, they are non-core in a different way as well. Therefore, their analysis of the core will differ, as well as the core’s assessment of that analysis. In short: to be able to do away with a binary, it is useful to first define as clearly as possible what that binary consists of.
3. 1991
1991 is an important year in the discussion about migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature in Australia. It starts with a rather combative essay by Robert Dessaix in the Australian Book Review. In it, he takes a stand against a “small, but eloquent band of people, usually from institutions, who actually have a vested interest in keeping constructs like Anglo-Celtic/non-Anglo-Celtic, English-speaking background/non-English-speaking background alive and functional” (Dessaix 1991, p 57
22). These persons are locking “our writers into categories they have willed into existence in the first place” (1991, p 23), because “they” are trying “to make the Australian reality validate French social and literary theory of the 1960s and 1970s” (Ibid). The result of this is that “the losers” are the writers, and the winners can be found among the “academics, the multicultural professionals” (ibid). These academics cannot take criticism either, according to Dessaix: “one of the commonest ploys of those who argue in favour of and promote multiculturalism is to pigeon-hole anyone who disagrees with them as ‘right wing’ at the very least and at worst racist” (ibid). Thus safeguarding himself, Dessaix mounts his attack, concluding that what he really objects to is the idea of an Australian literature that is “divided into ‘centre’ (Anglo- Celtic, mono-cultural, marginalising) and ‘marginalised ethnic fringe’” (1991, p 24). This is not only “patronising”, but also “exists only in the heads of the culture doctors”. Furthermore, it causes “considerable harm” to the writers they are trying to protect, because it “entrenches the deviance it seeks (honestly) to cure” (ibid). “I can’t see the point”, Dessaix declares, “of colouring them [Australian writers] red on the basis of their surnames as opposed to, say, George Papaellinas, whom you colour blue on account of his father’s ethnic background. I think it’s patronising humbug” (1991, p 25). The term “Anglo-Celtic” is “absurd”, Dessaix insists, and so is “multicultural”:
The fact is that there is no such ‘group’ as multicultural writers. There are writers with little English, writers with native English whose parents spoke Greek sometimes (or all the time), writers whose parents spoke perfect English but who identified with other cultures, writers whose chromosomes are all British who identify with other cultures, writers who had a step-mother who spoke a foreign language and yet who feel Australian, writers who are Russian but feel Jewish (1991, p 27).
To Dessaix, background does not matter, because at the end of the day “the sine qua non of literature is language” (ibid), not in the context of the binary English/non- English, but as in “literary skills”, and “up to now, statistically, not many writers from the ethnic communities have had them” (1991, p 28). In short: once they learn to write good literature, the silence will stop by itself. One of the people Dessaix singles out for condemnation is Gunew, who, Dessaix seems to say, mostly advocates only solutions she can herself provide. Dessaix here points to one of Gunew’s “strategies […] for including this group”: the anthology, something “Gunew is herself engaged professionally in undertaking” (ibid). 58
His polemic earns Dessaix “anonymous threats by phone and mail” (Raschke 2005, p 124), but not everybody disagrees. A few months later it is John Docker, in an essay for Island Magazine, who takes another swipe at Gunew, whose “theory associated with multicultural writing has been so successful that it now looms as a new orthodoxy” (Docker 1991, p 53). If Gunew was, he argues, “making a powerful point” “in the early 80s”, she has got her wires crossed now. Docker’s main objection to Gunew’s theories has to do with the way Gunew positions European migrants as victims of colonialism (perpetrated, in this case, by the “Australian ‘dominant culture’” (ibid)). Docker insists that this is flawed thinking, and makes the point that Europeans are as much colonialists as the British, and it is not true that the mere fact of their migration “suddenly, magically, purifies” them (1991, p 54). “For Aborigines”, Docker elaborates, “migrants are another set of invaders, not brothers and sisters on the margins, not the fellow oppressed and dispossessed” (ibid). Furthermore, the way Gunew describes “Australia’s ‘dominant culture’” as “‘unitary’”, and in a binary with “‘the migrant’”, is, according to Docker, wrong as well. Especially Gunew’s idea that one of the dominant themes “of the new migrant literature […] [is] the creation of a new ‘identity’ that clashes with the ‘old self’”, “risks a kind of ethnic cultural determinism”, and “would appear to be very restrictive, presuming and prescribing unities” (1991, p 55). “What”, Docker asks rhetorically, “of ‘migrant’ writers who might want to relate their writing […] to other things, to politics, gender, modernism, postmodernism?” (ibid). For the next few months, the discussion rages, especially in the Australian Book Review. Gunew, of course, gets her opportunity to retaliate, and so do people like Papaellinas, Muecke, Loh, Castro, Liberman, Lewitt and Shapcott. Apart from the bruised egos and the enjoyment of a good barney, what unites the respondents is their questioning of both the need for categorisation and the content of the categories. Also, there seems to be a general agreement that forcing people into categories has done more harm than good, both to the writers themselves and to the whole concept of ‘multiculturalism’. Two years later Gunew tries, in an extended reply to Dessaix, to again figure out what has hit her and her cause. Firstly, she distinguishes between two types of multiculturalism: one “a domain of government policies where a particular kind of political expediency is operating”, the other “a demand for full cultural enfranchisement emanating from those individuals or communities who do not derive their cultural traditions from either England or Ireland” (Gunew 1993, p 38). This last 59
group, Gunew calls “ethnics” (1993, p 39). Responding to Dessaix’s criticism, Gunew uses the image of the host and the guest, where Dessaix and mainstream Australia perform the former role and Gunew and her “ethnic” writers the latter.
The tactic of bringing one’s own tableware (anthologies and bibliographies) and substituting these for the ones at hand in order to change the monotonous composition of the design is to be outside the pale […] although we are sitting at a table presided over by a host, there must be no recognition of this state of affairs […].We are not permitted any reference to the existence of a mainstream culture (1993, p 44).
“The degree of anxiety provoked”, Gunew suggests, is the result of the fact that “our activities […] question the composition of the table and threaten to displace the host/guest dynamic” (1993, p 45). “Guests don’t pee on their hosts”, Gunew argues, so if they don’t behave as guests they must be “parasite[s]” (1993, p 47). She then goes on to conjure up the images of the perceived threat: “fifth column”, “foreigners attacking us”, “conspiracy”, “cost”, “contagion” (1993, p 48-49). The only way to disarm this peril is to diminish their self-esteem, by telling them that they can’t write, that “they produce noise instead of messages”, and are “stammering barbarians who cannot master the only real language that counts” (1993, p 52). The barbarians themselves, in the meantime, have clearly “grown tired” (Papaellinas 1991, p xi) of the whole debate. In a collection called Homeland, editor George Papaellinas takes a clear stand against any type of categorisation, even by writers and sympathisers themselves. “Such a strategy seems to rely on the apologetic premise that the ditch one digs and lies down in is prettier than the one dug for you” (ibid). Referring to the choice-making at his “multicultural festival” Dis/Unities, Carnivale Writers’ Week (ibid), Papaellinas states that regardless of the tag of “multicultural”, “writers and their writing weren’t categorised according to bureaucratic prescriptions – be they academic, or commercial ones defined by marketing needs. Nor was their writing. Writers were simply allowed to name themselves through their work, just as writers do” (1991, p xii). And that, as far as Papaellinas is concerned, is that: let’s get on with the writing, and invite “a democracy of voices” to write about one more or less articulated theme (ibid).
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4. 1992-1994
The next year Gunew publishes yet another bibliography, an extensive one this time, compiled at the Centre for Studies in Literary Education at Deakin University, in co-authorship with Lolo Houbein, Alexandra Karakostas-Seda and Jan Mahyuddin. Included are “those who command languages other than English in association with cultural (specifically literary) traditions which do not derive from either England or Ireland” (Gunew et al 1992, p viii). Discussing the parameters of inclusion, the authors state that the some 900 writers in question have had to adhere to one or more of the following characteristics:
First generation non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant (i.e. born outside Australia and from a language and cultural background other than English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh) who have published in English or a language other than English; 2. Second- or third-generation non-Anglo-Celtic writers […]. It does not include specific references to Aboriginal Australian writers or their writings since Australia’s indigenous cultural and language groups prefer, on the whole, not to be subsumed into a project which foregrounds the immigrant histories of all non-Aboriginal Australians (1992, p x).
In their introduction, Gunew et al start off by saying that “while the boundaries […] are never clean or clear-cut, we do not believe that this field is rendered irrelevant simply because its precise nature cannot be quintessentially and eternally defined” (1992, p viii), and then state that their bibliography “is an attempt to raise questions and encourage research and thinking around the issue of cultural difference [my italics]” (ibid). Exactly what this difference constitutes and what it is supposed to be different from, is not very clear, although one could say that by the exclusion of migrants with an Anglo-Celtic background, it is this ‘Anglo-Celtic’ that is apparently the defining term. Complicating this statement, though, is the fact that Elizabeth Jolley is included. Jolley was a migrant from England, but is part of the plethora of writers because “cultural difference operates quite explicitly in [her] work” (1992, p ix). Jolley is not a first generation non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant, though, and neither is her language and cultural background other than English. Also in the bibliography are David Malouf and Henry Lawson, the latter on the basis of his Norwegian father. Both, of course, were born in Australia. In 1993 two magazine editors take a stand in the discussion about migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature. After almost ten years of running Outrider, Manfred 61
Jurgensen decides that the term “multicultural” has not only become “objectionable, but even something akin to ‘socio-literary engineering’” (Jurgensen 1993, p ix-x). “All good art”, he claims, “is by definition ‘multicultural”’. A better term to use, Jurgensen insists, is “weltliteratur”, world-literature, by “overseas-born authors” (ibid). At the same time, Clarissa Stein, like Jurgensen a migrant from Germany, founds the Australian Multicultural Book Review: Australia’s Voice of Diversity, in partnership with the Australian Association of Multicultural Writers. To the Association, multicultural means nothing more or less than “people coming from various cultural backgrounds”; “various” a beautiful word to prevent category- discussions, and “diversity” an invitation to every voice around. The debate about classifications is far from over, though, because 1993 and 1994 will turn out to be the years of the Demidenko-affair. Because this hoax has managed to cause reverberations well into the next decade, I will try to incorporate the post-2000 academic writing on this issue here as well. One of the reasons why the Demidenko matter is included in this thesis, is that it shows, as George Papaellinas said in The Age around that time, “a fair amount of confusion […] in our ideas about non-Anglo- Australia” (Papaellinas in Buchanan 1995, p 17). I also agree with Susanna Egan, who argued in 2004 that “imposters challenge power relations, community relations, and those postures that define the terms in which people understand each other” (Egan 2004, p 19). In 1993, Allen and Unwin publish The Hand that Signed the Paper, a book by a young novelist called, as shown on the cover, Helen Demidenko. The book tells the story of Ukrainian-Australian Fiona Kovalenko and her uncle Vitaly, most of whose family was killed under Stalin’s regime. Out of his hatred for communism, Vitaly becomes an active promoter of Nazism and an advocate for the extermination of Jews. The jury of the Australian/Vogel competition awards it their prize in 1993, followed by the Miles Franklin Award in 1995. Literary figures like Andrew Riemer, Rosemary Sorensen and David Marr regard it a brave, if terrible, novel, and endorse it fully and openly. Demidenko herself parades her supposedly Ukrainian background wherever she can, “wearing Ukrainian national costume, doing folk dances, toasting with vodka and Ukrainian phrases” (Greenwood 1996, p 6). This whole performance blows up in her face when Courier Mail journalist David Bentley is contacted by Demidenko’s high school principal, who tells the reporter that Helen Demidenko is actually Helen Darville, the daughter of English immigrants Harry and Grace. Apart from a lot of 62
embarrassment and anger (and a spike in sales for the book), the whole episode re- ignites the already heated debate about what is by that time called ‘multicultural literature’. The issues have to do, as Raschke stresses, with
the nature, and underlying ethos, of the Australian literary community. It generated discussion about the importance of the cultural authenticity of the author, the ethics of cultural appropriation, and the Australian literary community’s own pretensions and acts of tokenism (Raschke 2005, p 128).
Both judging panels defend their choice by the saying that the novel brings “to light a hitherto unspeakable aspect of the Australian migrant experience”, as the panel of the Miles Franklin Award phrased it at the time (Website ‘Past winners’). Positioning the book in this way, as part of ‘multicultural’ literature, heaps on its promoters, especially after the revelations of Demidenko/Darville’s real identity, the accusation of positive discrimination for its own sake. Also, it suggests that literary criticism has become too focussed on one kind of colourful ethnic experience – an exoticism that dramatises our national culture as pluralist and inclusive. This has the perceived effect of ignoring ‘pure’ literary merit to prioritise as exotic a migrant experience as possible. In the context of this thesis my main interest in the Demidenko/Darville-issue is why Darville thought it necessary to substitute her identity as second-generation English for second-generation Ukrainian. Coming back to Papaellinas and Egan, I feel it is important to consider the confusion the debacle created, with people asking questions about the terms that had been used for classification in previous years. To start with two non-academic sources Raschke rightfully quotes in her thesis, the ‘Letters’ pages in the Sydney Morning Herald at the time are a good indicator of the mood of the moment. Two correspondents are, each in their own way, very clear in their ideas about the state of the multicultural debate: “Pseudonyms aside, it is likely that Helen Darville’s adoption of a Ukrainian identity enhanced her credibility as a ‘multicultural’ author”, Dr. Ida Lichter from Sydney offers (Lichter 1995, p 30), while Josephine Mazaraki ironically writes: “And to think that I doubted my ability to succeed. As a 22-year-old woman with a Polish surname, I am sure to go far” (Mazaraki 1995, p 30). In their minds, to be located as a ‘multicultural’ writer, your background has to be not just ‘ethnic’, but overtly ‘ethnic’. Having migrant parents, especially from England, is not considered to be a credible multicultural background. 63
This idea relates to Gunew’s definitions, for instance, which highlight ‘cultural difference’. In The Age, Rachel Buchanan asks the valid question “Who knows how the story would have been if ordinary, middle-class Darville, rather than the constructed, underprivileged Ukrainian Demidenko, had been the author all along?” (Buchanan 1995, p 1). Note how Darville’s English background is located here as “ordinary, middle-class” (read: boring), and Demidenko’s Ukrainian identity as “constructed [and] underprivileged” (read: interesting and different). Amidst a tidal wave of books (by Andrew Riemer, Robert Mann, and John Jost, to name a few) and (academic) articles about the affair, it is again Sneja Gunew who takes the lead next. This time it is with a prediction that is realised very soon. Fearing an “ethnic backlash”, Gunew writes: “Any hint of ‘ethnicity’ will now be drowned in […] raucous laughter […]. In Australian vernacular ‘doing a demidenko’ has already entered the vocabulary” (Gunew 1996, p 59). Addressing the issue of a “backlash” later, it is especially interesting to look at the academic debate surrounding this particular hoax. In 1996, Andrew Riemer’s conclusion in his book about the issue, is that “We should be wary of probing too deeply into these matters. Anyone with even a spark of humanity and compassion must recognise that a possibly deluded and therefore fragile and vulnerable individual occupies the centre of this curious affair” (Riemer 1996, p 177), thus locating the affair as the act of an individual lunatic and not indicative of societal framings. A year later, Kateryna Longley, writing as a Ukrainian-Australian academic, uses “‘the concept of the exotic’” to structure her reading of the issue, and states that “at the heart of this debate […] is the question of ethnic authenticity” (Longley 1997, p 30). The problem, Longley argues, is that “authenticity is always contextual and always partial” (1997, p 30-31), and that “the construction of the exotic is a mechanism for reinforcing a strong sense of identity for the individual or the community which is doing the viewing” (1997, p 31). Also, “ironically, the exotic gains access by vamping up its enticing difference, which is also its stigma, the mark of its alienness” (1997, p 39). Using the image of the “exotic”, of course, suddenly sheds a whole new light on the discussion and the categorisation of ‘multicultural’, that goes beyond “ethnic authenticity”. The term “exotic” conjures up an image that goes beyond ‘migrant’ or even ‘ethnic’ and ‘multicultural’. Exotic, as Longley argues, is associated with “alienness”, a difference that is not just visible, but also performable and readable. It is intrinsically ‘Other’, strange in the eye of the beholder, who is in the position of power that allows him or 64 her to look and define. What the Demidenko/Darville debate accomplishes, is, according to Nolan and Dawson in a special 2004 issue of ALS on hoaxes, that it stimulates thinking “about the implications for Australian cultural production of reifying certain racial and ethnic identities” (Nolan and Dawson 2004, p viii). Referring to Diana Fuss’ idea that identification is “‘the detour through the other that defines a self’ (1955)” (2004, xvii), looking at Demidenko/Darville’s performance of shifting and unstable identities, also calls “the certainty of all our identities into question” (ibid). Worthy of note as well, are the historical comparisons a few of the writers in this special issue of ALS make between Demidenko/Darville and Culotta/O’Grady, a second-generation Irish-Australian writer who posed as Nino Culotta, an Italian migrant, in 1957. They’re a Weird Mob was, of course, written at the time of the White Australia policy, and that is exactly, claim Nolan and Dawson, why this imposture was considered far less of a problem than what Demidenko/Darville did in multicultural Australia. As David Carter argues: “O’Grady’s deployment of the Culotta figure is most often understood as a more or less offensive form of passing or speaking for the other: white Australian deploys immigrant voice to make a disciplinary case for assimilation” (Carter 2004, p 57). However, because that was politically correct at the time, or at least not incorrect, it was considered “more bluff than fraud” (2004, p 56). Even better, “the revelation of O’Grady’s ‘wog drag’ appears, from the sales figures and the subsequent history of book and author, to have doubled the comic effect” (2004, p 59). What is also interesting, is that O’Grady’s “attempt at straight autobiography” (2004, p 71) turned out to be “the least successful” of his many books. There was little interest in who the second-generation Irish-Australian O’Grady actually was. Readers had been interested in an Italian migrant, and in somebody equally exotic, when O’Grady wrote No Kava for Johnny (1977), which was also a success at the tills. This book, Carter writes, “was promoted as ‘The Weird Mob of Samoa’”. There are enormous content-differences between the Darville and O’Grady-books, but in regard to their authors, the Demidenko/Darville and Culotta/O’Grady cases are very similar: second-generation ‘Anglo-Celts’ earning recognition and success by posing as people with more ‘culturally different’ credentials. Apparently, from at least 1957, public taste was ‘the more ‘exotic’ the better’, and ‘Anglo-Celtic’ was not the best or most profitable heritage to have in Australian literature – at least not if you want to tell a migrant story. 65
5. 1995-1996
Despite more and more people, especially writers, objecting not just to the content, but also the mere act of the categorisation, and a growing exasperation with the whole debate, Gunew tries to “frame marginality” again in 1994. Although the subtitle of Framing Marginality is Multicultural Literary Studies, Gunew states that she has
settled for ‘ethnic minority writing’, partly because it signals that such writing needs to be seen always in relation to something designated (although rarely in any overt manner) as ethnic majority writing; this usage ensures that cultural majority groups no longer remain invisible. The term ‘ethnic minority writing’ also encourages the analysis of cultural difference as a critical category within cultural criticism (Gunew 1994, p 23-24).
It is not clear to me what the terms “minority” and “majority” mean here. Are they categories within the migrant (or “ethnic”) population, or does “minority” refer to that population (or the category of “ethnic”) as a whole, while “majority” delineates the ‘core culture’ that has ‘ethnicity’ in its family history, but has not migrated recently? Also, if they are categories within the migrant, or “ethnic” population, then who is considered “majority” and “minority”? The problem is that “majority” suggests numerical domination, which is arguably no longer the case. A more appropriate term would possibly be subordinate ethnic writing, versus ethnic hegemonic writing, thus describing the possibility of attaining cultural power. As far as I understand her, this is not the way Gunew sees it, though. “Multiculturalism in Australia”, Gunew maintains in Framing Marginality, “incorporates all those other than the original settler- colonising groups composed mainly of people from the UK and Ireland […], ’multicultural’ tends to translate into ‘non-Anglo-Celts’” (1994, p 2). Talking about migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing, Gunew contends that “each of these terms has signalled the alterity of various writings produced in Australia but perceived as ‘other’ (alter) than the Anglo-Celtic norm” (1994, p 3). Gunew is critical of people like Outrider editor Manfred Jurgensen, who, she claims, has “indicated a different perception of multicultural literature by linking it with bourgeois culture by way of Weltliteratur” (1994, p 9). “The journal”, Gunew writes, “publishes overseas writers and Anglo-Celtic as well as non-Anglo-Celtic Australian writers”. This other “tactic”, 66
though, “does not fundamentally alter the premises upon which Australia’s national culture is founded […] it merely adds some more writers without considering the fact that this ‘supplement’ redefines the whole domain of Australian literature” (ibid). In fact, as Jurgensen himself writes that same year, Outrider has been “emphasising literary and cultural connections between a writer’s country of birth and Australia’s familiarity with that author’s native literary culture”. In other words, “the aim was to mediate between different literatures and, more specifically, to contextualise the work of bi- or multicultural Australian authors” (Jurgensen 1994, ix). The contrast between Gunew’s search for the right categorisation of difference and Jurgensen’s quest for inclusion and “connection” is clear here. It rests not only on Gunew’s emphasis on “other” instead of “similar” or “common ground”, as Jurgensen seems to do, but also on her description of Weltliteratur as “bourgeois culture” (Gunew 1994, p 9-10). One of the definitions of Weltliteratur Hoffmeister uses in his entry for The Literary Encyclopedia, is one that sounds a lot like Jurgensen’s: “Literary relations based on cultural contacts and either leading to the adaptation of foreign themes, motifs, and genres by a native literature or vice versa, the reception of national literary features, traits, and the works of individual writers by foreign authors” (ibid). Again, there is a big difference between this interpretation of the term and the Marxist standpoint Gunew seems to take. More to the point in a discussion about categorisation, is that this difference leads to very disparate consequences: one (Gunew’s) sets boundaries, while the other (Jurgensen’s) tries to cross them. Another reason why formulating the categories is starting to become a problem, is that by this time the composition of Australia’s immigration has been, and still is, changing. Of course, with that change comes a change in the types of writers who can be considered part of Gunew’s category of “ethnic minority writers”. Writing in Meridian, this is one of the points of criticism that Tony Simoes da Silva concentrates on in evaluating Framing Marginality. After acknowledging that “the need to foreground difference is central to Gunew’s intentional agenda”, Simoes da Silva then points to a gap:
in basing her theoretical framework […] on readings of the work of four ethnic minority writers of European extraction, she runs the risk of suggesting that ethnic minority writing in Australia is essentially European in vision and quality. That in the past it may have been so certainly does not preclude critics 67
working in the area from noticing its changing nature (Simoes da Silva 1995, p 76).
The fact that Gunew, according to Simoes da Silva, has missed these changes, has resulted in “a theory which implies, perhaps unwittingly but ultimately, that all ethnic minority writing ‘frames Australian writing’ in the same way” (1995, p 77). Also, he argues, that
Gunew works from a fundamentally flawed assumption that all Anglo-Celtic works are more or less mainstream and that all ethnic minority writing is logically marginal […]. Put another way, ethnic minority writing becomes a signifier of forcefulness and ‘straight-shooting’, whilst its Anglo-Celtic counterpart is defined as a site of artifice and passivity (1995, p 80).
6. 1996-2002
With the categories increasingly undermined and questioned from all corners, and the support for multiculturalism and ethnicity suffering opposition across the board, Gunew decides to leave Australia for Canada at the end of 1995. A few months later, John Howard comes to power, and in that same year, 1996, Manfred Jurgensen’s Outrider ceases operating. Gunew had been right in her predictions of an “ethnic backlash”, although it goes much further than that. After Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party become part of the political landscape, ‘multiculturalism’ becomes a bad word, quickly removed by Howard from official governmental bodies and language. In 1999, Manfred Jurgensen remarked that
Concerted politics of ethnic diversity, in Australia and elsewhere, aiming to facilitate a coinciding of artistic and socio-political recognition, have in fact done little to resolve the ideological bias and terminological ambiguities still bedevilling most discussions of literary (and other forms of) multiculturalism (Jurgensen 1999, p 267).
In 1998 The Oxford Literary History of Australia is published, followed in 2000 by The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. In the Oxford Literary History of Australia, all the references to ‘migrant fiction’ relate to literary history before 1965. ‘Multicultural writing’ is not mentioned at all, while ‘ethnic writing’ alludes to autobiography (p 255), poetry by writers with a non-English-speaking background (p 274), drama (p 305) or (sometimes wrongly delineated) second-generation ‘ethnics’ 68
(p 324-325). The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature has no lemmas for either migrant or multicultural fiction, instead focussing on ‘ethnic’ fiction and poetry. In this context, the editors concern themselves with history before 1965 (p 12), affirmative action (p 43), poetry by writers with a non-English-speaking background (p 101), Patrick White (p 127-128), performance poetry (p 168), government funding (p 183), very briefly with the shift in ideas about cultural heterogeneity in the 1980s (p 197), and literature about Asia and by Asian-Australian writers (p 202-205). Looking at the complete lack of analysis of the categories in both standard works, and the scant attention to the writing in general, it seems that, at least for the editors of these works, the whole discussion about migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing and writers has reached its end. Migrant writing has become a term to denote the past, multicultural writing does not exist at all, and ethnic writing is used to describe writers with a non-English-speaking background. Outside of Australia, though, there are still people interested in the issues. In 2001, Graham Huggan, professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds, publishes The Post-Colonial Exotic – Marketing the Margins. Huggan had been teaching and writing about Australian literature since midway through the 1990s, and, probably because he was British, came to the topic in a slightly different way. Looking at Australian literature from a postcolonial and ‘Commonwealth’ perspective, leads him to the viewpoint that earlier had been briefly explored by Kateryna Longley (above): the prism of the exotic. One of Huggan’s main arguments is that the delineation of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing is largely a matter of the eye of the beholder. It is not who these writers are, what they write about, or how they see themselves that is the defining factor, but how they are viewed by the outside (white, mainstream, apparently non-ethnic) world.
When creative writers like Salman Rushdie are seen, despite their cosmopolitan background, as representatives of Third World countries; when literary works like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) are gleaned, despite their fictional status, for the anthropological information they provide; when academic concepts like postcolonialism are turned, despite their historicist pretensions, into watchwords for the fashionable study of cultural otherness – all of these are instances of the postcolonial exotic, of the global commodification of cultural difference (Huggan 2001 p vii).
As Frankenberg does that same year, Huggan points to the power relationship between the person who is seen and the person who is doing the looking. Seeing, of 69 course, is not a neutral activity, but something done by somebody with a particular background, history and opinions. Huggan writes about “Western constructions” leading to “exoticist myths”, and locates the “Western observer/reader” as a voyeur for whom this literature can even be “profitable”, as long as it remains exotic enough (2001, p x). Only an “exotic” and sufficiently famous writer (like Rushdie and Kureishi, for example) can “strategically stage marginality” and “explore” an “ironic relation to majoritarian notions of British [in this case] national culture” (2001, xi-xii). In Huggan’s view, “multiculturalism’s celebratory ‘rainbow’ visions can easily be appropriated to recycle profitable exotic myths” (2001, p xiv), and “critics […] run the risk of ‘rendering otherness indistinguishable from exoticism, and of representing “difference” with no attention to the cultural nuances that differentiation implies’ (Suleri 1992a:12)” (2001, p 17). Difference, or otherness, or exoticism, then, has to look and behave in the way the observers want it to look and behave, not step outside its defined borders. In Australia, Huggan declares, the criteria used to define migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writers identify their work as “semi- autobiographical”, containing a “sociological” aspect, and coming from a “minoritarian ethnic background” that is “distinguished” from “the problematically conflated ‘Anglo-Celtic’ strand”. Furthermore, it is “designated” in an opposition, standing “in critical, possibly antagonistic, relationship to the legitimising narratives of the cultural mainstream” (2001, p 134). The result of that categorisation, Huggan suggests, is marginalisation and a certain type of almost patronising commodification. Huggan argues that this can lead to racism. In that regard, Huggan quotes Australian journalist Kate Legge, who wrote on 21 August 1995, at the height of the Demidenko- affair:
Some Australian artists have long suspected that in the fiercely competitive business of securing grants and subsidies a touch of exoticism goes a long way […]. Perhaps the pen name Demidenko was a superb marketing ploy and a savvy pitch for prize money in a society which often appears to treat Anglo- Celts as poor cousins to those of richer ethnic stock? (2001, p 142-143).
This is, I would suggest, a deplorable but logical consequence of the binary and insufficiently nuanced oppositions, where appointing a ‘them’ who are exotic enough to be profitable, has consequences for the ‘us’ who do not receive the earnings. Apart from a few publishers, nobody wins.
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7. 2003-2007
The issue of race and racism becomes more prominent in the discussion as the influence of whiteness studies grows in Australia. In 2004, Gunew, this time writing from Canada, looks at the relationship between colonialism and multiculturalism, and concludes that ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, and the new connotations of these words, are vitally important in assessing countries like Australia and the literature they produce. “The ‘new racism’ and attendant discourses of difference are primarily organized around an economy of the visible (as in the Canadian term ‘visible minorities’)”, she emphasises, as well as affirming that “‘ethnic’ is often a code word for an occluded process of racialization” (Gunew 2004, p 11). In an apparent response to the national and international debates alluded to in chapter two, an increasing number of academics examine the influence of “visibility” in the reception and categorisation of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature in Australia. In 2005, Jessica Raschke claims that “the psyche of whiteness is largely responsible for the difficulties experienced by writers deemed ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ in Australia” (Raschke 2005, p 8). “There are subtle yet powerful inclinations”, Raschke contends,
that prefer if not privilege the ‘white’ or ‘Anglo’ writer at the expense of a ‘non-white’ or ‘non-Anglo’ writer in Australia. This preference is guided by strong ideological assumptions that operate on an almost commonsense level, and, as such, they are rarely challenged or even noticed from both within and outside the Australian publishing and literature establishments (2005, p 30).
Writers “who are described and promoted as ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’”, Raschke argues, “are understood to be different. To be different is usually to be judged negatively. The consequence is […] that they are positioned on the ‘periphery’ rather than the ‘centre’. The division between ‘white’ (‘normal’) and ‘non-white’ (‘different’) therefore, is enhanced and consolidated” (2005, p 38). It is a premise confirmed in 2007 by Hsu-Ming Teo, who claims that writers like her, who are designated ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’, are mostly “placed in panels called ‘Alien Nation’ or ‘Home and Away’. Some of us obligingly fall in line with the requirements of the panel and adopt the mantle of victimhood” (Teo 2007, p 172). What Teo also contends, though, is that while this “cordons us off from automatic Australianness” (ibid), “the ethnic/multicultural tag” “can also reach a ready-made market […]. I refuse to whine that I don’t feel as if I belong when I work at a university and have 71
had the incredibly good fortune to be offered a public forum for my work” (2007, p 173). Again, there are quite a few confusing factors at work here: ‘white’ can be seen to describe mainstream status and power, and it gets you out of the category of ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’, even if you have ‘ethnic’ of ‘multicultural’ or ‘migrant’ stories to tell. ‘Ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ delineates people as marginal and peripheral. That does not give you power, but if you are deemed exotic enough, it will provide you with what Teo calls “a ready-made market” and a “public forum” for your work. In both cases, though, I would argue that the content of the work is often occluded by the categorisation of the author. In 2007, Huggan again focusses his attention on the link between Australian literature and, amongst other things, racism. One of the points Huggan makes, is that “Australian literary criticism continues to be hindered by its reliance on nationalist tropes and mythologized binary oppositions”, while its postcolonial version tends to “fall back on standard rhetorical manoeuvres and paradigms (‘othering’, Orientalism, hybridization)” (Huggan 2007, p ix-x). In a world where “‘new’ racisms have appeared”, that “reflect shifting relations of power and modes of cultural perception under the current conditions of late-capitalist globalization”, Huggan calls “for a return to postcolonial approaches to Australia and Australian literature” (2007, p x). Doing so would result in a better understanding of “Australia’s changing position in the world”, “while registering an ongoing need to balance ‘centripetal’ narratives of local, still often framed as national, community against ‘centrifugal’ experiences of global fragmentation and displacement (Dixson 1999; Whitlock 1999)” (ibid). As Gunew did before him, Huggan realises that this raises “several methodological problems”, one of them the question “How to move beyond the binary modes and models around which postcolonial approaches to Australia and/or Australian literature have tended until recently to be mobilized” (ibid). Confronted by the burning issue of “why it is that certain writers are considered more Australian than others, and are thus more likely to be accepted into the ‘Australian literature’ fold” (2007, p 11) and with the binaries in mind, Huggan suggests that it is now necessary to “examine” “the connections between race, writing and difference” “more carefully”, and place them “within the history of racial representation or, perhaps better, the history of racialized discourses in Australian literary texts” (2007, p 22). Furthermore, it is vital “to ‘deconstruct the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge 72
inherent in popular and academic usages of ‘race’” (Gates 1986:6)” (2007, p 23). One of the problems of the binary ‘mainstream-different’, Huggan contends, is that the mainstream professes to know not only what different means, but also what it should consist of. “The ‘ethnic’ enters Australian culture as an already read text”, and ’”this is the essence of postmodern racism (Mishra 1996: 350-1)’” (2007, p 109), Huggan reasons. The type of patronizing attitude in which ‘we’ claim to know who ‘they’ are and what ‘their’ lives look like, leads to
compartmentalization, even fetishization of ethnicity, as in mainstream constructions of ‘multicultural literature’, in which writers who are perceived as coming from different, preferably disadvantaged backgrounds are engaged to perform, usually for a limited season, within an equally restricted repertoire of pre-set cultural roles’ (2007, p 114).
8. 2007-2010
Looking at the history of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature in Australia, a few conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, that the focus has shifted over time in the descriptions of who these writers are, and that this is closely related to the make-up of the immigration to Australia. At the start, migrant writing was writing by migrants in the dictionary-sense of the word: people who had migrated to Australia from another country, usually Britain or Ireland. The focus of their work was a comparison between the old country and the new, the old life and the new, and the friction or joy that was the consequence of that. After the Second World War, and the influx of migrants from non-English-speaking countries in Europe, the attention shifted to language as a determinant. Although anthologies like those of Lolo Houbein still consisted of migrants, most of them were now described as non-Anglo-Celtic, and ‘ethnicity’ had become a way of distinguishing non-English-speaking migrants from those who had migrated from English-speaking countries. Also, ‘ethnicity’ was used to create a binary between the core and this ‘different’, non-core group, both in the presumed content of their writing and the life-experiences of their creators. The next step in this process was to include second- and third-generation non-migrants in the group marked ‘different’, as long as their parents or grandparents had a non- English-speaking background. English-speaking migrants (especially white ones) had, by this point, completely disappeared from the category. From roughly halfway 73
through the 1980s, after the arrival of migrants who were even more visibly different than the post-War migrants, this visibility became part of the classification, with a new focus, by the 1990s, on race. Also, questions were being asked about perception and positionality: who was actually determining these binaries and how ‘different’ (and ‘exotic’) did people have to be to be included in either ‘mainstream’ or ‘multicultural’, or core or non-core? The issue in 2009 and 2010, as far as I can see, is that although the binaries still exist, there is a partial move towards labelling everything that has been written in or about Australia as one big category: Australian literature. At the same time the complications associated with categorisation have not been solved.The Australian Literature Resource database AustLit, for instance, insists that “the fact that these categories (especially ‘multicultural writing’) have survived seems a clear indication that the reasons why they were invented in the first place have not gone away”, and that the labels are “useful, in spite of their limitations” (Ommundsen 2004, p 1 www.austlit.edu.au/run?ex=SETISText&brn=636825). At the same time, the pages that introduce the ‘Australian Multicultural Writers Subset’ proclaim that the focus is on reflecting “the diversity of Australia’s literary community and the diversity of Australian culture in general” (www.austlit.edu.au/specialistDatasets/MW). The editors of the subset also declare that it “contains biographical details of writers who have identified [my italics] particular cultural backgrounds, and bibliographical description of their works” (ibid). This focus on “diversity” and self-identification, though, has puzzling results. For instance, the lemma (headword) ‘migrant writers’ brings up 73 names. A large number of these writers are not migrants at all, but were born in Australia. Two of the writers in this group, curiously enough, are Helen Darville and John O’Grady. Also, only four English-speaking migrants are included, leaving out writers like Alison Croggon, Bryce Courtenay, Anne Kellas, JM Coetzee and John Mateer from South Africa, Rodney Hall, Kris Hemmensley, Catherine Padmore, Cate Kennedy, Drusilla Modjeska, Alan Gould, Elizabeth Jolley and Alex Miller from the UK, Philip Hammial, Sara Dowse, Lucy Frost, Linda Jaivin and Jerri Kroll from the USA, and Alma de Groen, Jennifer Compton and Ruth Park from New Zealand, to name but a few. Although one could argue that migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature could possibly have been written by anybody, the description ‘migrant writer’, I would say, has to apply to any writer who has migrated, and only to writers who have come from somewhere else. 74
Another sign of this move towards some sort of integration is the call for “cosmopolitanism”, or “trans-nationalism”, by academics like Robert Dixon. In his 2007 speech at an ASAL conference, Dixon claims that times have changed and that it is necessary for Australian literature specialists to follow suit. After the 1980s, “when academics were busy questioning canonicity and disciplinarity in the name of difference, and using literature to practise cultural critique”, “present times require an active defence of disciplinarity and exploration of other ways of approaching literature, including cross-cultural comparisons” (Dixon 2007, p 17). This time, the “cross-cultural comparisons” are not to be made inside Australian literature, but between Australian literature and literature from other regions in the world. Dixon appeals for the “‘internationalising’ of Australian literature” (2007, p 21) and “a transnational practice of Australian literary criticism” (2007, p 22). This move away from the discussion about multiculturalism inside, focussing on differences within Australian literature, to an examination into the relationship of a united national literature with literatures abroad, flags the apparent need to end (or avoid?) the internal binaries. The 2009 Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature subsequently follows Dixon’s lead, if only partially. In the section on ‘Fiction and Drama from 1950’, written by Kerryn Goldsworthy, the whole migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing issue is not even mentioned, as if it had not been part of the history of Australian literature. Also, Jose’s ‘General Introduction’ states that this Anthology includes “work by someone born or living in, or writing about, Australia” (Jose 2009, p 2), and that the editors have used “an inclusive definition of ‘Australian’” (2009, p 3). Curiously, migrant, ethnic, or multicultural literature does, briefly, resurface in the chapter on ‘Poetry and Non-Fiction from 1950’, penned by David McCooey. The emphasis here, though, is on ‘thematic’ issues, like ‘self and place’ in poetry (McCooey in Jose 2009, p 44), and ‘identity’, ‘memory’ and ‘auto- biography’ in non-fiction (2009, p 47). Also interesting, and perhaps a sign that the Australian literary establishment is not ready to let go of the old binaries just yet, is that after the Anthology is published, the absence of “writers of a migrant background”, as Ivor Indyk describes them (Indyk 2009, p 7), becomes a hotly debated topic in literary journals. Also in 2009, The Cambridge History of Australian Literature is published, under the editorship of Peter Pierce. ‘Migrant’, or ‘migrant literature’ is not mentioned here, and the word ‘ethnic’ is associated with ‘minorities’ and 75
‘autobiography’ (McCooey in Pierce 2009, p 334-5). ‘Multiculturalism’ is briefly referred to in the context of ‘children’s literature’ (2009, p 294), ‘theatre’ (2009, p 409), and gets a subordinate clause – “in the fate of multiculturalism and the idea of citizenship” – (2009, p 550) in an analysis of the place of literature in the nation. The discussion about race, migration, ethnicity and literature is not over, though. The 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards goes, in the case of fiction, to Nam Le, for The Boat, a book partly about arrival and displacement from a migrant’s perspective. The non-fiction award is shared by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ Drawing the Colour Line, a history of racism in Australia and elsewhere, and House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, described by its writer, Evelyn Juers, as a book “about migration, war, upheaval and literature” (Wyndham 2009, p 9). It seems that ‘Australian literature’ finds itself, again, engaged with questions of race, ethnicity and migration. I would suggest, therefore, that while working within the new inclusiveness is valuable to avoid the old binaries, it is important to make sure that the internal differences do not get overshadowed even more powerfully within this contemporary national program. This is why this thesis looks at the categories in detail and asks for clearer definitions. Only when these are critically unambiguous is it possible to view the separate components of Australian literature, which in turn provides a more transparent analysis of Australian literature as a whole.
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CHAPTER 4
LITERARY ISSUES, ESPECIALLY THE ROLE OF THE AUTHOR
1. Barthes, Foucault, Bennett and Sontag
Since I am arguing for a return to a contextualized reading based on the author’s own background, it is necessary to position this thesis in relation to literary theories which have pushed away from author-based, biographical approach. In later years, literary theories arising from psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, queer theory and others have re-stressed the author-work nexus, but they had to do that in response to models by people like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The key work in this movement, of course, is Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’. Although this influential essay was only seven pages long, whole books have been written since, in an attempt to explain the meaning of Barthes’ words and their implications for literature, reading and writing. I will trace some of these interpretations, including, as Barthes himself does, some historical context to them and Barthes’ thinking. A great help in making sense of all of this, is Andrew Bennett’s The Author (2005). Bennett starts with an investigation of the word ‘author’ and the entry of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary, that
suggests that the common-sense notion of the author involves the idea of an individual (singular) who is responsible for or who originates, who writes or composes, a (literary) text and who is thereby considered an inventor or founder and who is associated with the inventor or founder of all nature, with God (with God-the-father), and is thought to have certain ownership rights over the text as well as a certain authority over its interpretation (Bennett 2005, p 7).
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Bennett goes on to quote historian Martha Woodmansee, who argues that an “author” is “‘an individual who is solely responsible – and thus exclusively deserving credit – for the production of a unique, original work’ (Woodmansee 1994a: 35)” (Ibid). Bennett labels this definition of authorship “Romantic” or “modern”, associated as it is with the “implicit assumption that the author of a work is in control of that work, knows what it means and intends something by it, that she delimits and defines its interpretations” (2005, p 7-8). It is this premise that Barthes attacks in his essay, insisting that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barthes 1977, p 142). It was the “polemical aggression embedded within” the title of Barthes’ essay, which “prompted a sense that Barthes was issuing a death-threat or indeed that he was engaged in an assassination attempt”, Bennett states (Bennett 2005, p 10). Still, Bennett claims that Barthes’ “declaration may seem to be relatively uncontroversial” (Ibid), especially considering the difference between speech and writing. Speech is there in the moment, impossible to separate from the speaker. “Writing remains, it lasts after the person that writes has departed”: “writing can be read after the absence, including the radical absence that constitutes death, of its author” (ibid). Therefore, “on one level at least”, “the assertion of the ‘death of the author’ may be seen as giving no more than proper recognition to the nature of writing” (2005, p 11). Of course, Barthes’ premise is far more radical and fundamental than that: the questions he raises “subvert long-held beliefs concerning the priority of the human, of individuality, of subjectivity and subjective experience; and he challenges conventional conceptions of the institution of literature and the nature and status of the literary work” (ibid). Barthes’ intention is to “[abolish] authorial voice, [eliminate] voice as origin and source, voice as identity”, and the “principle of a certain unity in writing” (Foucault 1988 (1979), p 142). “It is language which speaks”, Barthes declares, “not the author” (Barthes 1977, p 145). It is important, Bennett argues, to position Barthes’ writing within the context of its time and place. Writing after Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God and “within the context of Marxist, psychoanalytical, structuralist and poststructuralist transformations and deformations in philosophy, linguistic, anthropology and literary and cultural studies of late-1960s French intellectual culture” (2005, p 14), this was, 78
Bennett claims, “revolution in the head” (ibid). For Barthes, concepts such as God and the author were inextricably linked, “the author as kind of presiding deity, the Author- God” (ibid), the be-all-and-end-all of a text. It was this unmoveable authority that Barthes objected to: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 1977, p 147). Only if we accept that “we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God)” (1977, p 146), can the reader – which also includes the critic – be free to interpret the text as text. “In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered”: there is no “secret”, no “ultimate meaning”, and to acknowledge this “may be called an anti- theological activity”: “truly revolutionary, since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” (1977, p 147). Ultimately, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (1977, p 148). In Barthes’ way of thinking, the death of the author generates freedom for both the writer of a text and its reader. It “[liberates]” readers “from the oppressive control of authorial consciousness”, while the author, “[redescribed]” by Barthes as “‘scriptor’”, can now perform as “an agent of language”, without having to worry about “‘intentions’” (Bennett 2005, p 15). If Barthes’ intention is to eradicate the author, according to Susan Sontag he cannot help but leave a vestige of the old concept intact. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes that “in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure […] as he needs mine” (Barthes 1975, p 27). Sontag even insists that much of Barthes’ work “is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer” (Sontag 1982, p xvii) and argues that Barthes models his ideal writer on Gide: “supple, multiple; never strident or vulgarly indignant; generous […] but also properly egotistical; incapable of being deeply influenced” (1982, p xviii). There seems to be for Barthes, therefore, some sort of organising subject behind the text, if not the author (as institution) then maybe the writer (as interpreter or user of multiplicity of language and intertextuality). In his engagement with Barthes’ essay, Michel Foucault extends Barthes’ project and turns writing into a machine-system: “while Barthes asks ‘who is speaking’, Foucault asks another, even more fundamental question: ‘what does it matter who is speaking?’” (Bennett 2005, p 19). Where Barthes focuses more on author and reader, Foucault concentrates on writing itself, “sensing the danger”, Bennett reasons, that “arguments designed to challenge an 79 author’s privileged position will in fact tend to work to preserve that privilege and, as he puts it, ‘suppress the real meaning’ of the author’s ‘disappearance’ (Foucault 1979: 143)” (2005, p 21). “God-like, the author becomes, precisely in his absence, the fount, the origin of all meaning” (ibid). The way Foucault does this, notably in his essay ‘What is an Author?’, is to question what happens after the death of the author. The challenge, for Foucault, is to “locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, to follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (Foucault 1988 [1979], p 200). “It is not enough,” Foucault reasons, “to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work in itself. The word ‘work’ and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author’s individuality” (1988 [1979], p 199). To understand how writing and authors came to be determined in the way they were, Foucault suggests the necessity of a historical investigation. In doing so, Foucault introduces the concept of the “author- function”, which is linked, he claims, to four attributes. Firstly, there is a legal aspect, connected to the way ownership (of a text) has been viewed historically. Then there is the issue of what types of text have, over time, “required attribution to an author” (1988 [1979], p 202) and what that means. Thirdly, the author-function “does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is, rather, the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call ‘author’” (1988 [1979], p 203). Therefore, he reasons, there is a big difference between “the author” and “the real writer” (1988 [1979], p 205), in much the same way as there is a distinction between “the author” and “the fictitious speaker” in his text (Ibid). In explaining the importance of his theory, Foucault states that he realizes
that in undertaking the internal and architectonic analysis of a work (be it a literary text, philosophical system, or scientific work), in setting aside biographical and psychological references, one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject. Still, perhaps one must return to this question, not in order to re-establish the theme of an originating subject, but to grasp the subject’s points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies (1988 [1979], p 208-209).
It is not just that we need to examine the ways the text is “determined by […] subjectivity” (Bennett 2005, p 27), like “the biography or the psychology of the author” (ibid); it is important to look at the workings of subjectivity itself. In 80
Foucault’s words: “It is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analysing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse” (1988 [1979], p 209). This has been taken as a cue to disregard actual author/biographical context, but clearly it does not completely demand this. Although all of this implies, Foucault writes, that “I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author” (ibid), he also warns that it would be “pure romanticism” (Ibid) to “imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure” (ibid). It seems Foucault wants his readers to question not so much authorship (a book being written), but the author as somebody that is “a figure of singular achievement” (Birns 2010, p 62).
2. Before Barthes
As Foucault acknowledged, it is the author as a legal entity, the owner of copyright, which affirms personal authorial status. With the (legal) attachment of a name to a piece of work, authorship becomes something that is foregrounded. This is especially the case in Romanticism, “with its stress on individuality, on uniqueness and originality, on the conscious intention of the autonomous subject”, and “a more general development of the idea of the self” (Bennett 2005, p 56-7). The idea of a firm connection between text and writer now takes hold. The individual and her life experiences, emotions and ideas take centre stage: Bennett uses M.H. Abrams’ image of the mirror and the lamp to explain the change in “the dominant model of literary creation” (2005, p 59). Abrams describes Romanticism as a period in which “the work ceases to be regarded as primarily a reflection of nature, actual or improved; the mirror held up to nature becomes transparent and yields the reader insights into the mind and heart of the poet himself” (Abrams 1953, p 23). In this “expressive point of view”, literature is being discussed and finally perceived as “an index to personality” (ibid). Poetry is seen to be “caused” by “the impulse within the poet of feelings and desires seeking expression, or the compulsion of the ‘creative’ imagination which, like God the creator, has its internal source of motion” (1953, p 22). Hereafter, the author is more than an individual: he is the Author-God whom Barthes will try to kill around 150 years later. Bennett argues, though, that Barthes was not the first to 81
struggle with the problem of the author. Even in the Romantic period, “writers and critics have almost obsessively dwelled on the complex interaction of authorial presence and absence” (2005, p 66). First, of course, there is the matter of inspiration. If inspiration is God-given, then what is the role of the author? Is she just a note-taker, someone who writes down what comes from above? Then there is the complicated and troubling relationship between the writer’s biography and the text. Here Bennett turns to “the chronically autobiographical W.B. Yeats”, who writes in a 1937 essay on his own work that “a poet writes always of his personal life”, but “never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table”. “Even when the poet seems most himself”, Yeats declares, “he is never the bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been re-born as an idea, something intended, completed: the writer is ‘part of his own phantasmagoria’” (Yeats 1994, p 204). Again, as with inspiration, important here is the idea that the writer is both inside and outside the text, both present and absent. So instead of focussing on either-or binaries, this leaves a space for a unification of apparent opposites. Bennett notes paradoxical similarities between “Romanticism’s insistence on the subjectivity of the authorial self” and the “modernists’ insistence on impersonality” (Bennett 2005, p 66). He points to T.S. Eliot’s seemingly contradictory assertion that poetry is, not a “turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; not the expression of personality but an escape from personality”, while at the same time stating that “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape” from them (Eliot 1975, p 43). So to be able to be absent in the text, to arrive at impersonality, there has to be a presence, a personality, to start off with. In the 20th century, J.M. Coetzee will remark that “writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place”, before he goes on to note: “In fact, it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say” (Coetzee in Attridge 2004, p 23). Yet even the claim of authorial ignorance implies that there is an author behind the claim, somebody who is driving it and focussing attention to herself in the process. So Barthes’ essay empowered the reader at the cost of the author, and Foucault surrounded and mitigated the reader’s agency by attending to the systems within which texts came to be and reading occurred. New Criticism and Formalism, as well, were “a reaction against the idea that the author stands at the centre of the work of literary interpretation” (Bennett 2005, p 73). One of their reasons to focus on text and 82
text alone, Bennett argues, was to avoid a study of literature that “would amount, at most, to a form of the higher gossip, to ‘chatter about Shelley’” (ibid). According to key New Criticism writer Cleanth Brooks, biography and psychology had to be “kept in its place, and out of academic criticism” (Brooks 1998, p 53-57). At about the same time as Brooks formulates his credo, Wimsatt and Beardsley, in their 1947 essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, look at the author and his intentions, and whether it is possible, as a critic or a reader, to know what these are. They conclude that the “design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1967, p 3). Although they concede that “a poem does not come into existence by accident”, that it “comes out of a head, not out of a hat”, and that there is a “designing intellect as a cause of a poem”, this does not mean that the author or his intention should be “the standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet’s performance” (1967, p 4). “Intention”, they write, “is [sic] design or plan in the author’s mind”, but it is difficult if not impossible for the critic to “find out what the poet tried to do” (ibid). It is also not very fruitful. Either the intention is evident in the text, in which case the critic does not have to go outside the text to examine the intention or the life. Or it is not in the text, in which case there is no impetus to examine the intention or the life either. A text “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it” (1967, p 5). “Judging a poem”, Wimsatt and Beardsley write, “is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work” (ibid). Looking for the author in the text can never be anything more than guesswork, and Wimsatt and Beardsley are focussed on hard evidence, on “an objective way of criticism” (1967, p 18), a science of professional reading. The worst thing a critic can do is ask the writer to talk about his text. Focussing on Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, Wimsatt and Beardsley state: “Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem ‘Prufrock’; it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle” (ibid).
Even during the heyday of New Criticism’s scientific objectivity, however, the author did not entirely disappear from critical view. Before there was Barthes, there was rhetoric. Wayne Booth, in his The Rhetoric of Fiction, breaks narrative into a mechanics of elements, but still claims that “the author is present in every speech 83
given by any character”. Every facet of a text calls “attention to the author’s selecting presence”. “His very choice of what he tells will betray him to the reader”: “We must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear” (Booth 1961, p 18-20). Booth does not advocate biographical criticism, because he concedes that there is no direct line from the author’s ‘factual’ life (Yeats’ breakfast table) to the text. On the other hand, Booth does not believe in New Criticism’s ‘text as text’ either. He argues instead that there is a complicated ‘game’ going on between the author and the reader, where both attempt to get in contact with each other and set up a form of human discourse through the text and its technique. Booth claims that the author, in writing, creates “not simply an ideal, impersonal ‘man in general’ but an implied version of ‘himself’ that is different from the implied authors we meet in other men’s works” (1961, p 70- 71). This is not a call for biographical reading, but it acknowledges that a text does not only have an author in general, but a very specific, personal one, and that it is this specific author of this specific text who creates a specific implied version of himself, one that differs from what another author would have done. In a 2005 essay, Booth makes it very clear that he is “appalled by the number of critics who have embraced the ‘death of the author’”, and asks the question “how could anyone ever believe that the author’s intentions about a work are irrelevant to how we read [and criticise] it?” (Booth 2005, p 75). Readers, Booth writes, have information about the author, either biographical or through the text, and keep this at the back of their mind while they are reading. This influences their interpretation of the text. It is impossible for a reader not to wonder about the intentions of the author, which does not mean necessarily falling into the trap of biographical reductionism. Bearing in mind the cautions of Wimsatt, Beardsley and Booth, especially for the case of migrant writing a few issues have to be discussed here. Firstly, biographical reading is not necessarily related to authorial intent. What is in the text, intended or not, can be correlated with, read in relation to, or seen as a symptom of, biographical context. Secondly, in migrant writing – while recognising that this should not be equated with ‘artless’ spontaneous autobiography – the purpose of the fiction is to relate (even at second or third remove) to life experience. The critical definition of the mode implicates the fictional text in its author’s circumstances, irrespective of authorial intent. So we can take the cautions, but the migrant writing mode refuses our confinement to reading the text as self-sufficient. Also, if we do 84 apply a narrow New Critical approach, it potentially blinds us to allegorical/symptomatic signs of migrant inspiration.
3. Feminism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and migrant writing
The way of looking at literature as a ‘science’, had the effect of suppressing attention given to the author, either as a person or as a function. This allowed cultural norms to go largely unchallenged, until critical projects such as feminism arose. Famous for concepts like ‘the personal is political’ (and the other way around), one of the issues feminism addressed was a change in the ideas about the relationship between the author and the text. In establishing a feminist/female identity, “Authorship is”, as Rita Felski writes, “an indispensable part of the feminist toolkit (Felski 2003, p 58)”. Or, as Nancy Miller poses it: “The ‘removal of the author’ can be seen as an attack on the very foundation of feminist discourse, on the politics of identity (Miller 1995, p 195)”. Bennett, paraphrasing Miller, asserts that the notion is that : “Since women had never been coded as possessing […] authoritative status”, “the theory of the death of the author simply did not apply to them” (2005, p 84-85). Other feminist literary critics, like Cheryl Walker, make an argument for “reanimating the author, preserving author-function not only in terms of reception theory, as Foucault would seem at one point to advocate, but also in terms of a politics of author recognition” (Walker in Irwin 2002, p 143). Although “the postmodern feminist critic is almost certain to practise her trade in defiance of authority”, and there are many questions about the possibility of a unified subjectivity, Walker believes that “the author has never quite disappeared from our practice” (ibid). The question is not whether to go with “Barthes’s belief that the most revolutionary form of criticism requires refusing to discover the author in a space of writing”, or to opt for “the proposition […] that the author provides the only locus in which meaning can properly be ascribed”: feminists, Walker argues, select “a third position” (2002, p 144). “What we need”, she declares,
is a new concept of authorship that does not naively assert that the writer is an originating genius, creating aesthetic objects outside of history, but does not diminish the importance of difference and agency in the responses of women writers to historical formations. The loss of the writer runs the risk of losing 85
many stories important to our history. Radical freedom […] may in the end leave us without the tools necessary to consider the way biography and fiction are in dialogue with one another and provide a critique of patriarchy as well as, in some cases, models of resistance. Barthes’s form of textual response [and structuralism in general] would leave us with no literary history whatsoever (2002, p 148).
Feminist concern for the social effects of theory is shared with writers and critics who originate from other groups that have not had their opportunity to use their particular voice yet. In this, feminism has clear and direct links with, for instance, migrant and non-white writers who equally demand the right to “consider the way biography and fiction are in dialogue with one another” and tell the story of their history. Also, Walker is clearly influenced by both New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, with their call for a broader view of texts and a different approach to the role of the author. New Historicism is a form of historical criticism interested in “researching the contexts of the production, consumption and status [of literary texts]” (Cuddon 1998, p 545). It is “opposed to the pure formalism of the New Criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism”, and “constantly interrogate[s] the relationship between history and literature” (1998, p 546). Authors are creatures of their time, place and social settings, and are “selves fashioned and acting according to the generative rules and conflicts of a given culture” (Greenblatt 1990, 164). To ‘read’ an author is to ‘read’ her times, and the other way around. For Cultural Materialists, Terry Eagleton stresses, the author is one of the “things involved in the making of a work of art”. “Works of art have a kind of ‘unconscious’, which is not under the control of their producers”, but the producer is at least the “co-creator of it, without whom it would not exist”. However, Eagleton also stresses that there is a “play of power and desire in cultural artefacts, to the variety of ways in which they can confirm or contest political authority”. This, he argues, “is as much a matter of their form as of their content”, and it is important to understand how “intimately works of culture belong to their specific times and places”. “The same is true of our responses to them, which are always historically specific” (Eagleton 2003, p 96-97). New Historicists focus more on the past, while Cultural Materialists see today as part of history (and history as part of today). Both schools of thought are interested in re-reading canonical texts in a slightly anti-establishment fashion, and ask questions about cultural appropriations of those texts (and authors) and what those mean. Brannigan affirms they have been “primarily interested in examining the 86
process of inclusion and exclusion, incorporation and marginalisation, acceptance and opposition which are characteristic of the dominant culture” (1998, p 42). In that regard, they are reminiscent of Gunew’s claim that migrant writing should be regarded as “a dangerous supplement [...] that redefines the whole domain” (Gunew 1990, p 28). Cultural Materialists take a more political stance than New Historicists, and stress that “culture is a constitutive social process which actively creates different ways of life” (Macey 2001, p 16). Poststructuralist ideas are an important part of both theories, and “chief among these was the idea that all human behaviour, practices and knowledge were constructs and inventions, rather than natural or instinctual”, which “leads to the practice of reading texts as participants in the construction of human beliefs and ideologies” (Brannigan 1998, p 21). “There is”, Brannigan emphasises, “no division between text and context, or between literature and politics” (ibid). Raymond Williams, for instance, is interested in literature “not as a privileged form for the expression of genius, nor as a league table of achievements in subtlety and complexity of language, but rather as one form of social experience and practice” (1998, p 38). This is because language changes, “just as the material practices, objects and institutions to which it refers, change”, and “in this way, culture and society are mutually interactive”. It is not the individual author Williams wants to assess (because no man is an island), but the “specific cultural conditions in which literary texts are produced and received” (1998, p 39). For Cultural Materialists in particular, it is important to produce “oppositional readings of dominant forms”, as well as “recognising where and in what conditions incorporation has taken place” (1998, p 41). Again, Gunew comes to mind, when she pointed toward the “potential power” of migrant literature to do exactly that (Gunew 1990, p 28). If Cultural Materialism aims to show “the extent to which conservative interpretations ignore the problems of race, gender and sexuality in literary texts” (Brannigan 1998, p 116), it might be used to open up questions of nationality and ethnicity as well. In this way, it has a lot in common with postcolonial, whiteness and feminist criticism which also examine these differences. This whole idea of reading for difference and dissonance, is central and should be central, reasons Felicity Nussbaum, because we cannot assume that discourse “[floats] free of lived experience”: there is “a hierarchy of causes and effects” (Nussbaum 1989, p 14) that critics cannot be indifferent to. Individual subjectivity, in authors and readers alike, is “a function of difference (gender, class, race, and so forth)”, and acts of reading (and 87 writing) “can destabilize power” (Brannigan 1998, p 123). All these theories seem to be very appropriate while thinking about migrant literature. If Raymond Williams is right in stating that literature is closely connected to social experience, then migrant writers cannot help but have their texts be at least influenced by their personal migrant experience as well. Furthermore, following the ideas of both Cultural Materialists and New Historicists, these specific works have something to say about “inclusion and exclusion, incorporation and marginalisation” (Brannigan 1998, p 42), and therefore need to be read in that context. This is what this thesis proposes to do, while trying to avoid the danger Walker flags: “The loss of the writer runs the risk of losing many stories important to our history” (Walker 2002, p 148). With all these ideas and theories at our disposal, the issue then becomes: how to read?; and especially: how to read the work of migrant writers in Australia? This thesis attempts to answer such questions in the following chapters. Firstly, a definition. As discussed in this study, migrant writing is writing by migrant writers whose work is influenced by their migrant experience; a migrant writer is someone who has migrated. It seems a very simple and maybe even simplistic point of departure, but it is an important one nevertheless. The experience of the act of migration and the subsequent arrival in and adaptation to the new country distinguishes these writers from writers who have not personally lived through this. So called ‘second- or third generation migrant writers’ have a different, one could call it ‘second-hand’ knowledge, through their parents or grandparents. Their own experience, if they have been treated as different by the core culture, is distinct from somebody who was actually born and raised in a country and culture outside of the core. Although this is in itself valuable and separate, for example, from the experiences of writers who were born in Australia, it is not the same as physically and mentally having to modify or amend (part of) who you are. Also, my premise is that the migrant writer always writes as, or from the perspective of, an outsider, even if her aim is to be or to become part of the national literature. This position of difference in itself produces meaning, and in migrant writing the differences and the experiences generating them are an especially important part of the textual production network.
Coming back to the way to read this particular kind of literature, I would like to start with Bourdieu, who argues that in order to access art, it is important to realise that “consumption” is: 88
a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception. A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded (Bourdieu 1998, p 1029).
Therefore, to be able to understand what it is we read, it is vital to take advantage of as many “codes” as possible. The first port of call seems to be the text. A text supplies themes and patterns, and ways of using language. If these suggest that there is experience informing these, a full reading has to take that experience into account. Without that, one cannot discuss the artistic individuality of the text, that which takes it ‘beyond’ the authorial self. To understand the point of the art, it is necessary to consider the subjectivity of the writer. Foucault poses the question, “what does it matter who is speaking?” In answering him, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously asks another question: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1988, p 271). In her essay, Spivak describes the way in which, in this case, “subaltern” women, “speak, have spoken, are speaking but are rarely heard’ (Davies 1998, p 1009), because they are “positioned, represented, spoken for or constructed” in a particular way by the outside world (ibid). This classification not only obstructs their voice, but also the way they are heard. Both are distorted, in a way, and therefore, to paraphrase Bourdieu, de- coded, without “voir” or “savoir”. When Foucault asserts that “the text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author” (Foucault 1988, p 204), I would suggest that this is even more the case in migrant writing. In this case, the migrant writer is not simply “an agent of language” (Bennett 2005, p 15), free to “write”, as Sontag describes Barthes’ ideal writer (Sontag 1982, p xxi). Language, position and experience force a more agential, conscious and communicative style of literature. In Australia, at this moment in literary and sociological history, there seems to be a tendency to insert most literature that is written in Australia into the ‘national’. As I discussed in chapter 3, terms like ‘globalisation’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘transnationalism’ seem to have replaced discussions about internal divisions. Secondly, some authors and texts are positioned as migrant writers and texts, even if they are not, while other writers who are migrants and reflect the migrant experience, 89
are included in the national, according to the cultural capital of both nation and ideas of majority and minority. I would suggest, though, that even when this social production makes an author ‘national’, there can be a great number of signs in the text that assert ‘migrant’ subjectivity and experience. Not taking this into account erases and pigeonholes certain types of migrant writing and their producers, while at the same time obscuring (or, in other cases,) highlighting difference. In any case, because of this practice, it becomes even more important to pay renewed attention to the figure of the author and her biographical experience, as relayed through her texts. Only when this is done, is it possible to see how some works might be re-read, despite a concerted effort of society to produce a narrower model of migrant writing (or ignore it all together). Literary criticism has a particular responsibility in how it views both texts and authors, because it takes the lead in presenting a writer and her work to the reading audience in a certain way.
4. Migrant themes (general)
If the starting point is the text and the themes and signs therein, it becomes necessary to look at what have been historically considered ‘migrant themes’. Although it is wise to avoid generalizations, Wenche Ommundsen argues that this
does not mean that we should not look for commonalities and continuities across the diverse terrain that is multicultural writing. Not surprisingly, the life experiences and cultural positioning of ethnic minority writers have thrown up a number of recurrent motifs, thematic as well as formal, that can be usefully traced in comparative readings, within Australian or across multinational multicultural traditions. These themes include physical, psychological, and cultural dislocation and alienation, the search for cultural and personal roots, the outsider’s perspective on Australia, exploration of the myths and cultural traditions of their homeland, family and generational disharmony, racial and ethnical discrimination, tensions between traditional and modern views on gender, sex, age, and family relations – to name only some of the most common (Ommundsen 2007, p 78).
To simplify the issue a little bit, I would suggest that central thematic concerns of migrant writers are identity, home, and history, and the question of how to write about the ‘consequences’ of those three. Identity, to start off with, is a complex subject in 90
modernity, no matter who is thinking or writing about it. In this age, we have come to realise that identity can be
regarded as a fiction, intended to put an orderly pattern and narrative on the actual complexity and multitudinous nature of both psychological and social worlds. The question of identity centres on the assertion of principles of unity, as opposed to pluralism and diversity, and of continuity, as opposed to change and transformation (Robins 2005 in Bennett et al 1998, p 172).
Robins argues that identity is very much associated with concepts like community and belonging, with having “a culture in common”, which “has been regarded as the fundamental condition for self-expression and self-fulfilment”. This type of identity, says Robins, quoting David Miller (1995: 175), “‘helps to locate us in the world’”, “‘telling us who we are, where we have come from, what we have done”’ (2005, p 173). Robins calls most of the “old” discourses on identity “essentialist”, because “they make the assumption that the identity and distinctiveness of a person or a group is the expression of some inner essence or property”, “a ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’ quality” (ibid). More recently, he states, what has been foregrounded in the debates on identity, is the realisation that identities are “socially constructed”, “instituted in particular social and historical contexts”, and are more often than not “strategic fictions”, “subject to continuous change and reconfiguration”. It is also important to note, Robins argues, that identities are not “self-sufficient: they are in fact instituted through the play of differences, constituted in and through their multiple relations to other identities. An identity […] derives its distinction from what it is not, from what it excludes, from its position in a field of differences” (ibid). However, it is one thing rationally to grasp this concept of identity as a floating signifier (and enter into academic discussions about essentialism), but quite another to incorporate that into the changing view of the self the migrant carries with him or her. Psychologically speaking, I would argue that, as Iain Chambers maintains, “we imagine ourselves to be whole, to be complete, to have a full identity and certainly not to be open or fragmented; we imagine ourselves to be the author, rather than the object, of the narratives that constitute our lives” (Chambers 1994, p 25). For a non-migrant, the issue of identity can come up as the consequence of a self- examining disposition. For a migrant, though, it is usually the automatic result of the move. As Salman Rushdie claims: “Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between 91
two stools” (Rushdie 1992, p 15). Rushdie calls this experience “ambiguous”, and talks about a “shifting” “ground” (ibid), eloquently describing the “profound uncertainties” (1992, p 10) that can be the consequence of this. There is a complicated doubleness in the experience of the migrant. Leaving changes the self, and turns identity into a fragmented, interrupted and heterogeneous concept. The more or less continuous timeline has disappeared, to be replaced by a caesura between before and after. The confrontation with the new country, and the way the migrant’s identity is viewed and positioned there, changes that identity as well. The self now becomes partially defined by the relation the migrant has, or is seen to have, with a national identity (or core culture). Individual coherence can become difficult, especially when confronted with ideas of insiders and outsiders in both the new and the old country (and the position the migrant is seen to inhabit within those ideas). Migrants are forced to realise that they are “simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the situation at hand, experiencing a constantly challenged identity, and realise that identity is, in itself, like history and home, a cultural construct” (Chambers 1994, p 6). The migrant does not have the choice of thinking about identity, because it is always there. This is why it is not surprising that so many migrant writers have this issue at the heart of their work. Connected to the issue of identity is the question of home, which in itself is a codeword for notions like belonging, place, displacement, dislocation, in-between- ness, location, traditions, and landscape. If there can be no ‘true self’, or unified identity, anymore, then the idea of an ‘authentic’ home comes under attack as well. By leaving, everything has become foreign and has to be re-defined and re-created. Again, there is the anti-essentialist realisation that in this age of migration, home is “no longer a dwelling, but the untold story of a life being lived” (Berger 1984, p 64). Rapport and Dawson even suggest the “working definition” of home as the place “where one best knows oneself – where ‘best’ means ‘most’, even if not always ‘happiest’. Here, in sum, is an ambiguous and fluid, but yet ubiquitous notion, apposite for a charting of the ambiguities and fluidities, the migrancies and paradoxes, of identity in the world today” (Rapport and Dawson 1998, p 9). It is Iain Chambers who, once more, asks questions about the psychological reality of these rationalisations: “Despite the optimistic theorising of nomadism and rhizomatic becoming, the mystery of that sense of belonging – deposited in the desire, the need, to be part of a historical, social and cultural unit that is called ‘home’, ‘homeland’ – 92 refuses to fade away” (Chambers 1998, p 33). Some migrant writers, like Brian Castro, distrust this desire and need, and even assert that it is “just a failure of nerve” (Castro 2004-5, p 39). Castro insists it is necessary to “question one’s attachment to place”, and “look relentlessly for false feelings. Place”, he argues, “can be a cloying illness – nostalgia, a pathology” (ibid). Rushdie goes even further and calls migration, despite, or maybe because of its difficulties, “a form of rebirth”. He recognises “the sense of a writer feeling obliged to bring his new world into being by an act of pure will, the sense that if the world is not described into existence in the most minute detail, then it won’t be there. The immigrant must invent the earth beneath his feet” (Rushdie 1992, p 149). There is, for Rushdie, the realisation that “the migrant intellect roots itself in itself, in its own capacity for imagining and reimagining the world” (1992, p 280). Where Rushdie views this as a strength, and even something of an added extra that the migrant has been granted because of his uncertain position, Papastergiadis maintains that part of
the migrant sensibility is the chilling fear of having lost a certain sense of time and place. There is the impending awareness that, having left home, there is no possibility of a seamless return. Parallel to this loss is the anxious realization that having gained entrance to another space does not amount to a feeling of full acceptance. For many migrants the modernist promise of progress is often seen as a hollow victory (Papastergiadis 2000, p 74).
It is this fear and loss that gives the migrant writing addressed in this thesis its sense of urgency and often even anxiety; literary investigation here is not an abstraction or even just the production of art, but an exploration into personal survival. From looking at these three white, English-speaking migrant writers, it also becomes clear that these preoccupations are not confined to ‘ethnic’ migrant writers, or writers whose first language is not English. They are a universal migrant concern. Coming back to the issue of loss or gain in a moment, the third migrant preoccupation is, I would argue, with history. According to Berger, “the mortar which holds the improvised ‘home’ together is memory. Within it, visible, tangible mementoes are arranged – photos, trophies, souvenirs – but the roof and four walls which safeguard the lives within, these are invisible, intangible, and biographical” (Berger 1984, p 64). For migrants especially, (their) history is an assemblage of unreliable memories, stories told and re-told, re-interpretations of a (not always ‘correctly’) remembered past. There is always the risk of nostalgia, the safe place 93 away from “extraterritoriality”, as Alex Miller calls it (Miller 1992, p 94), a situation where the individual (migrant) has fallen out of history, place and circumstance. Again it is Salman Rushdie who details the difficulties of memory and history after migration. Visiting Bombay, his “lost city”, after a long absence, Rushdie is confronted with the forgotten colours of his birthplace: “The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye”, he writes (Rushdie 1992, p 9), and he realises that in writing about it, he has not been “capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost” (1992, p 10). He, and migrant writers like him, create, he stresses, “fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (Ibid). There are “the mistakes of a fallible memory”, like “broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” (1992, p 10-11). For Rushdie, this is one of the advantages of migrancy: “It was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains” (1992, p 12). Loss generates a need, and with that a possibility, that is not, or not as readily, available to non-migrants:
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self- evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere’. This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal (ibid).
So, the question then becomes how to write about these issues, and whether they can be seen as loss or gain. Under what conditions is it possible, as Docker and Fisher maintain, to view migration as an “adventure”, “a voluntaristic or an involuntary departure towards new identity” (Docker and Fisher 2000, p 16)? “The exile as outsider”, they contend, “can make intellectual and aesthetic journeys that are wayward, unusual, challenging, eccentric, irritating, unsettling”. Migrants “can release the repressed, can ‘perform’ a ventriloquism of new identities, can construct new biographies and genealogies of and for themselves” (ibid). “Great art”, Terry Eagleton emphasises in a study on migrant writers in Britain, “is produced […] from the subtle and involuted tensions between the remembered and the real, the potential 94 and the actual, integration and dispossession, exile and involvement” (Eagleton 1970, p 18). If that is true, migrant writers are ideally situated to create such literature, because for them there is always this multiplicity that informs their thinking and their experiences. Everything is uncertain, up in the air, and with this comes what Rushdie calls a “burdensome freedom” (Rushdie 1992, p 124). Loss and gain are to Rushdie like the two heads of a Janus face: “Migrants may well become mutants, but it is out of such hybridisation that newness can emerge” (1992, p 210). For Brian Castro, this is not just a possibility, but stronger than that: it is an axiom, a calling, even.
Real thought is always in between, inseparable from a complexity of feeling. It always suffers from contradiction, since contradiction is the experience of truth. In order to allow such vagabond ideas full dialogue and debate – for this is the agony and achievement of any civilisation – we have to sever the umbilical; head out for the territory beyond’ (Castro 2004/2005, p 40).
Castro acknowledges that “everyone must belong”, and that without belonging “one is a non-person” (2004-2005, p 46), but nevertheless advocates a productive displacement. His is almost a call to arms: “For the exile, only dislocation can enable a newness that simultaneously ruptures the idea of progress. To be able to speak at all is to be aware of not playing the game, by refusing celebration, the desire to be adopted, the rites of inclusion. Language overthrows everything” (2004-2005, p 47). Of course, this requires a strong stomach and a brave heart, for both the migrant and the new country. For the migrant there is, apart from his own individual dualism, the problem that “hegemony is everywhere at work; so to acquire national culture – its language, history, customs and rites – is always somehow less than to be born with them” (Hage 1996, p 467). For the new country, the migrant, as Other, stranger, outsider, threatens to “disrupt the stability of the domestic scene” (Chambers 1998, p 35). His presence “reconfirms the non-positionality, the liberal movement, of those who inhabit the national centre, the political mainstream”. Because the new country automatically imposes “limits” and erects “barriers”, this affects “not only the outsider; they equally construe and limit the very nature of the ‘inside’” (Chambers 1998, p 38). Writing, therefore, becomes, for the migrant writer, a perilous and precarious adventure, a balancing act of loss and gain. And this, I would suggest, is true for all migrant writers, including white, English-speaking ones.
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5. Migrant themes in literature by white, English-speaking, migrant writers
Over the last couple of years, there has been a tentative understanding that migrant themes are not only to be found in what is generally considered ‘real’ migrant (‘multicultural) literature, written by authors like Rushdie and Castro, but in works by white, English-speaking migrants as well. In 2008, Anne-Marie Smith brought together short stories, essays and poetry by forty-five writers, and this time the “multicultural” tag actually meant just that. Here are Italian, Spanish, Kurdish and Chinese authors, but also American and British ones. From these stories, it is obvious that despite the biographical differences, the themes and preoccupations are the same: identity, belonging, home, exclusion, landscape, difference, homesickness, memory, even language (Smith 2008). Not surprisingly, though, this anthology was less successfull than similar compilations with more different writers were. I will come back to the particular experiences of selected white, English-speaking migrant writers later, but for now I would like to focus generally on the writings of a few, almost randomly chosen, figures, to see how these themes manifest in their work. In ‘Jogging Memories’, Paul Turnbull describes his life as a child of ‘Ten Pound Poms’, working-class migrants employed by General Motors in Brisbane. “British working-class migrants”, he contends, “occupy a curious and still largely unexamined place in Australia’s postwar history” (Turnbull 1996, p 11). After conceding that non-English-speakers had a worse time than British migrants, he maintains that for the latter “migration was not without heartache”, and that for “the older generation especially, outer Brisbane suburbia often proved an emotional wilderness” (1996, p 12). Turnbull writes about “a continuing sense of distance”, a “feeling of estrangement”, and a “daily routine of abuse” (1996, p 13). “Experiences such as these bred a culture of resistance” (1996, p 14), Turnbull argues, “[entrenching] a defensive and in many ways socially conservative sense of community” (1996, p 16). The knowledge that “they will never be other than ‘poms’” has resulted in a feeling of distance from Australia that, especially in the older generation, still exists (1996, p 17). From his experience in this community, Turnbull has an interesting view on the Darville/Demidenko-affair. After “it was revealed that she was in fact the daughter of British migrants”, Turnbull asserts that what he
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most felt was empathy. Why shouldn’t Helen Darville refashion herself within Australia’s postwar history as Helen Demidenko, a lively and assertive ethnic voice? I can recall dreaming on numerous occasions of doing likewise, and quite possibly for a similar reason: being a working-class pom (1996, p 10).
Of course it is easy to dismiss this and call it ‘me-too-ism’, but this does not address Turnbull’s argument (and emotion). Apparently, his experience is that the voice of a “working-class pom” is not heard or valued when it comes to the migrant experience. Also, that to be heard, there is a need to turn yourself into something more “lively and assertive”, somebody who is considered a ‘real’ migrant, someone who has got a ‘real’ story to tell. Another autobiographical account of white, English-speaking migrant experience comes from Mary Rose Liverani, who won the 1975 Barbara Ramsden Award for The Winter Sparrows – Growing Up in Scotland and Australia. In describing her arrival as a thirteen-year-old in 1952, Liverani is scathing about both the Australians and the migrants. In the migrants she deplores their almost grovelling need to belong: “People always want to be Australian. If you aren’t, you can get by with a particular note of apology: ‘I’m not yet, but I’m doing my best’” (Liverani 1975, p 224). Personally she minds the poor hostel conditions and the Pommie-taunts less than the fact that she feels she has to be grateful for every blanket and second- hand chair her family receives. It is a sentiment that is mirrored by her mother, who eventually organises the migrants and tells “the multitude” at a meeting that “If we have to be poor, I’d rather be in a place where I’m no’ swept under the carpet as if I didnae exist” (1975, p 333). In Liverani’s work, all the ‘normal’ migrant themes are there: the identity confusion (feeling Scottish, being treated like a ‘Pom’, trying to understand what ‘becoming Australian’ implies), the homesickness, the nostalgia, the language problems, the non-belonging. Moreover, these preoccupations are not limited to working-class migrants either. The poet Margaret Scott, educated at Cambridge and after her migration to Tasmania predominantly employed as an academic at the University of Tasmania, is equally concerned with “[reflecting] on a British/Australian identity” (Blair 2005, p 133). According to Ruth Blair, Scott’s poetry is about “finding home”, about “a dialogue between two places: the Bristol of her childhood and the specific areas of her Tasmanian life” (ibid). It has “to do with her conception of personal and cultural memory”: “in order to proceed to a ‘future’, the past life in the ‘other’ place is the inescapable fact of immigrant identity – that 97
which will never go away. These are poems of someone attempting to understand how an identity is forged in a dialogue between the two selves” (ibid). Blair stresses that in Scott’s writing “the idea of home encompasses the very idea of living”; that through language, and especially by describing the old and the new landscape, Scott is investigating what it means to be “at home in the world”. “Perhaps”, Blair concludes, “it comes back again to the immigrant experience – that heart and mind go down some odd paths, drawn merely by the need for there to be connection” (2005, p 138). Furthermore, not only British-Australian migrant writers explore the personal and literary consequences of their migrancy. In Anne-Marie Smith’s already mentioned anthology, there are poems by American-Australian Heather Taylor Johnson which not only “[contemplate] distance” (Taylor Johnson in Smith 2008, p 223), but almost drown in homesickness and longing. Another example of a young American-Australian writer is Emily Ballou, whose 2007 novel Aphelion examines the multiple meanings of home and belonging for a family in Old Adaminaby, displaced by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme; for Hazel Ray, an American museum curator who has come to the region to catalogue the town’s history; and for the migrant workers on the Scheme. As in Margaret Scott’s work, Ballou uses the differences in old and new landscape, and old and new language, to describe feelings of foreignness and outsidership. Landscape, here, also encapsulates memory and history, “a past held by the trees” (Ballou 2007, p 25), that confronts newcomers with a powerful feeling of non-belonging, of trespassing even. When Hazel starts collecting fragments of the old town for her exhibition, aptly named “The Encyclopaedia of Traces” (2007, p 445), Ballou writes: “Hazel thought of herself attaching the old ladies of the town on a drip, draining memory like blood. Jars of recollection lined up on a shelf putting her ear to the glass and hearing dream sequences from under water” (2007, p 177). Ballou concludes in Aphelion that memory, especially after one has been separated from the physical place where the past events took place, is always unreliable. Like the history of the drowned village of Adaminaby, the past will always be fractured, re-designed to best suit the present. Home, after you leave it, might not be anything but an idea, an illusion, something longed-for, instead of an actual place. A site, a method, a process through which “lost things come together” (2007, p 157), equal parts regret and freedom, and completely made of memory. 98
British-Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley did a lot of serious thinking about migrant writing as well, sometimes prompted by fellow British migrant Caroline Lurie. In Lurie’s 1992 biography of Jolley, Jolley argues that “human themes are universal, but the theme of migration from Britain to Australia can be particular” (Jolley in Lurie 1992, p 136). “As well as the effects of the sights and sounds of the strange new country, there has been the uneasiness of being the stranger, the newcomer. Most people try to overcome feelings of strangeness by making a tremendous effort to belong” (ibid). For writers, Jolley emphasises, these differences, uncertainties and longings are the raw material of their work. Asked how her writing has been influenced by her migration, Jolley writes: “Until I came to Western Australia I had never seen or heard a flock of cockatoos. […] To come to this country is to come to foreign land. How can I be the same person after the flight of the cockatoos?” (1992, p 75). The new images and experiences “made and continue to make an impact. They serve, too, to sharpen the images from the places where I was before” (ibid). “There was a time”, Jolley reasons, “when writers, some writers, felt they had to deny their regions. But it is the very places where you live and walk and carry out the small things of living that the imagination, from some small half-seen or half-remembered awareness, springs to live and goes on living” (1992, p 76). There is, for instance, “the sound of a landscape”, that “[transports you] to another place. Perhaps it is necessary for the writer to have this experience” (1992, p 98). In order to write about the Australian landscape as an outsider from such a different land, a writer has to recognise “that landscape is not simply formed by geology and geography, but by personal emotion. Writers and other artists create their own landscape. […] Each of us creates his own version of Australia and we see with our minds and our memories as much as with our eyes” (1992, p 99). Furthermore, Jolley stresses, it is very important, especially for the migrant writer, to “need to know our place in society. From a known and acknowledged position in the society in which we live we can try to make clear decisions and judgements and are often able to step into creativity” (1992, p 108). This positioning is one of the issues I am looking at in this thesis, especially because this can be such a difficult subject for white, English- speaking migrant writers. One of my arguments is that this is not just because they look similar, but also because their language background seems the same. The question, though, is whether that is really the case.
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6. Language
With the apparent confluence of migrant, ethnic, or multicultural writing and languages other than English that has long dogged the categories (and partially still does), it is important to take a closer, if brief, look at language in general. According to Bill Ashcroft, language is more than a communicative tool; it is also a cultural symbol. Therefore,
Language has power. It provides the terms by which reality may be constituted, it provides the names by which the world may be ‘known’. The system of values it conveys – the suppositions on which it appears to be based, the concepts of geography and history it articulates, the attitudes of difference inscribed in its words, the myriad gradations of distinction encompassed by its lexicon and grammar – becomes the system upon which social, economic and political discourse is grounded (Ashcroft 2009, p 1).
Additionally, “A language”, as David Malouf emphasises,
is the history and experience of the men and women who, in their complex dealings with the world, made it; but it is itself one of the makers of that history, and the history it makes is determined – limited – by its having developed in one direction rather than another; in one direction to the exclusion of others. It is also shaped and changed by what is said in it (Malouf 2006, p 48).
Considering the importance of language, and the fact that language use signals who the user is and where he or she ‘fits’, it is vital that writer and reader understand each other’s positions. In order to make sense of and appreciate what a writer is writing, a reader needs to know what his or her linguistic and literary background is. Of course, the language known as ‘English’ has many different versions. Malouf poses the following questions:
What do we mean when we think of ourselves, and of the Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, and the very diverse inhabitants these days of the British Isles, as ‘English speakers’? Don’t we need to ask ourselves, in each case, in what sense ‘speakers’, and ‘which English’? It is all very well to regard language as simply ‘a means of communication’. It may be that for poor handlers of a language and for those to whom it is new and unfamiliar, who use it only for the most basic 100
exchanges. But for most of us it is also a machine for thinking, for feeling (Malouf 2006, p 48).
Although, as Malouf argues, “the family link is English”, he feels that it is “worth pointing out that a shared language is not necessarily the same language” (2006, p 6). That is where, for migrant writers whose first language is English, the problem starts when they write for an Australian audience, about their migrant experience. A comparison can be made with the colonists Jay Arthur discusses in The Default Country. “Colonisation”, Arthur declares, “is an event in language as well as in space” (Arthur 2003, p 17). Arthur’s “lexical cartography” has a myriad of examples of linguistic confusion within the English language, and she states that the consequence of this confusion is “double vision” (2003, p 18). Australian rivers which do not seem to know how to be rivers, but are “lost”, “wandering aimlessly”, are “degenerated” and flow to “a dead end”: these rivers are understood as “defective” (2003, p 18-20). “A similar difficulty occurs around the use of ‘lake’”, dry and salty, and therefore “unnatural” (2003, p 20-21). There is, Arthur contends, a “tension produced by the discrepancy of language and experience” (2003, p 20). “The language does not fit the landscape; the words are describing somewhere else” (2003, p 21). “The double vision results in expectation and disappointment. The words look for what is not there, for the other country that didn’t happen” (2003, p 24). This turmoil experienced by the colonists is, I would propose, comparable to that encountered by modern-day migrants whose first language is English. The words have changed meaning, and because of this, migrants are forced to understand that Australia is different, alien even, and that they have to re-learn a language they thought was theirs to use. That language changes when circumstances do, has been known for generations. Writing in particular about the American situation, Edwin Thumboo asserts that even culture alters “in response to the realities of the new environment, evolving variations and sub-sets. Difference sets in, whether of politics, economics, religion, folk ways, music, social practices, pioneer-frontier experience, or nudging other cultures” (Thumboo in Zach et al 2008, p 94-95). Thumboo quotes American lexicographer Noah Webster to explain how important language is, not only in describing, but also proudly denoting this difference. “‘As an independent nation’”, the instigator of what came to be known as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary wrote,
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our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard: for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our own tongue (Webster in Thumboo in Zach et al 2008, p 95).
This ‘post-colonial’ pride is also evident in Susan Butler’s foreword of the 1984 Macquarie Thesaurus, which is, she contends,
as well a book of cultural significance, because it makes it possible for us to observe in the patterns that it reveals the focus of thought in our society, the way in which our collective mind tends, the underlying assumptions about the world around us and about humankind, which are so important in shaping our future (Butler in Thumboo in Zach et al 2008, p 95).
The mere fact that there are distinct dictionaries for the languages of the former colonies, leads to the conclusion that “we need to distinguish between what is proposed as a standard code, English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre), and the linguistic code, english, which has been transformed and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world” (Ashcroft et al 2002 (1989), p 8). Confusing and disrupting that binary are, I would propose, the English-language speakers who migrated to one of the colonies, especially from the old centre, Britain, itself. In their new country, their old language, English, is considered english, while the new one, previously viewed as english, is regarded as English instead. In their study of ‘Ten Pound Poms’, Hammerton and Thomson tell the story of Margaret Hill, who recalls that local shopkeepers in Australia
‘used to pretend they couldn’t understand what you were talking about’, as when she asked for ice cream: ‘we used to call them tubs and they call them dixies here – and I’d say, “I’ll have a tub” and they’d say, “If you don’t know what you’re talking about, well take yourself off somewhere else, you Poms should learn to speak English”’ (Hammerton and Thomson 2005, p 146).
The pride of the ex-colony in formulating its own language has resulted in a loss, or at least a need for adaptation, for the migrant. Paul Carter, himself an Englishman who migrated to Australia, wrote about the difficulties of language after migration, stating that
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Any orientation to the new environment depends initially on finding resemblances between it and the home left behind, the clarity of light (and life) here may throw the muddiness of one’s former existence into clear and critical relief, but the very possibility of comparison implies a conceptual vocabulary that can be transported from one place to another (Carter 1992, p 2).
Migrants, Carter argues, are forced to go back to a stage in their lives when they were new to the language, and even the world. Not just because the words have suddenly changed meaning, but especially because Australians who were born here do not understand, or do not want to understand, these difficulties. When the migrant “seeks to articulate this, he is greeted with silence, with furrowed brows and a tacit order to hold his tongue, to behave as an infant” (1992, p 7). As Carter sees it, there is no real solution to this dilemma available to the migrant:
Mirroring the host culture’s languages, gestures and manners back to them, migrants will be treated at best with condescension, at worst with suspicion. Their skills as actors may enable them to get by, to avoid confrontation, but trapped in the mirror of others’ expectations, they will not construct a space where they can speak for themselves. […] Both emotionally and intellectually, migrants lack a tertium quid, a third position that avoids the arbitrary wilfulness of the other two stances (1992, p 100).
That tertium quid is as essential for migrants who have English as their first language as it is for non-English speakers. Especially for writers it is difficult to have lost not only their first physical, but also their first linguistic home. For writers whose first language is not English, there is the possibility of ‘using’ the fact that they are ‘translated’ men or women in their writing, if they choose to do so. This, in a way, illuminates the story of difference (for example, migrancy), if that is the story they want to tell. For writers whose first language is English, but an English that is non- Australian, this is more difficult. The difference is masked always by the presumption of sameness. This is especially the case if their name sounds similar to what John Howard might call an ‘ordinary’ Australian name, and readers might be forgiven for assuming linguistic and cultural correspondence. Cross-cultural translation is always part of migration, but the content of that is more marked when the visual and aural differences are pronounced. So what language can an English-english/english-English migrant writers use to make the transition audible and readable? What linguistic space is available to them, one that gives voice to the difference and allows an understandable dialogue with the reader? What else is there to do other than either 103
assimilate and run the risk of obscuring the difference, or over-emphasise the difference by turning the language into an English-language version of what Jane Warren called “wogspeak” (Warren 1999, p 86)? Is this type of ‘creole’ even possible for English-speaking writers, and if so, what does that look like? I will look at these issues, and many more, in the ensuing chapters.
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CHAPTER 5
RUTH PARK: A VOICE FOR OTHER OUTSIDERS INSIDE
When Ruth Park died just before Christmas 2010, warm tributes flowed for the 93-year old. Geordie Williamson, The Australian’s literary critic, dubbed her “Sydney’s Dickens” (Williamson in Romei 2010, p 4) and the word “our” was used in almost all obituaries; “one of our most loved writers” (Falconer in Romei 2010, p 4), whose “literary legacy is part of our rich heritage”, “who told us our stories” (editorial The Australian 2010, p 18) and has a “place in our pantheon” (Curnow 2010, p 10). Stephen Romei even proclaimed that Park had left “her mark on the nation’s psyche” (Romei 2010, p 4). It is high praise indeed for any Australian writer, to be recognised as so quintessentially Australian, quintessentially ‘ours’. Yet Ruth Park was not, I suggest in this chapter, unproblematically Australian at all. As most of the homages briefly touched on, Ruth Park was born in New Zealand and migrated to Australia in 1942 and it was out of this migrant experience that her artistic sensibility evolved. I want to argue here that the fact that she was a migrant deeply influenced most, if not all of her work, particularly her fiction. Migration, with its requisite mix of loss, longing, ecstacy and anxiety, informed much of Park’s writing. From The Harp in the South onwards, Park focussed on the stories and the voices of other outsiders like herself, people who were on the margins of Australian society because their heritage was considered different from the core. Ruth Park received many of Australia’s highest honours: a Miles Franklin Award in 1977 and the Order of Australia in 1987, to name just two. This acknowledgment of a writer “who told us our stories” is remarkable given her hyphenated identity and the signs of this in her writing. Yet it is 105
also something that Park, at the time of her first novel, could not possibly have foreseen. On December 28, 1946, the Sydney Morning Herald announced the winners of its first literary competition. Second prize went to Jon Cleary, for You Can’t See Round Corners, a gritty story of an army deserter hiding out in Sydney’s back alleys. Sydney, although the star of the book, did not come off lightly; in Cleary’s description it was full of prostitutes, violence, alcoholism and poverty. Nevertheless, at the time of publication, in early 1947, the book was received well and did not attract angry letters to the newspaper. The same could not be said of the winner of the competition, The Harp in the South, by Ruth Park. As soon as the Herald published the book’s synopsis, the city was up in arms. It started, as Park herself remembered in her 1993 autobiography Fishing in the Styx, when the book was denounced from the pulpit. “‘Immorality in print’”, was a priest’s verdict, a “‘slandering of that great race, the Irish’”, a “‘wicked book’” by a “‘conscienceless’” young woman who instead should have taken the chaste example of “Our Lady” who “‘would never have stooped’” so low (Park 1993, p 148). The furore that ensued was, as Park observed, “a unique psychological study of the popular mores of the late 1940s and early 1950s” (1993, p 147). During the weeks the novel was serialised in the Herald, and the newspaper and the writer were bombarded by a “torrent of phone calls, telegrams and mail” (1993, p 148). The nation seemed seriously divided; writers like Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Jean Devanny and Dame Mary Gilmore sent “messages of congratulations” (Park 1956, p 189), while at the same time there were “forceful, angry and abusive” objections to the book (Park 1993, p 148). In her autobiographies, Park wrote about being perplexed by the variety of the complaints. On the one hand there were people who said the novel “was a cruel fantasy”, because “Sydney had no slums”, while there were others who maintained that “yes, there were slums, but they were populated exclusively by criminals and deadbeats. The novel, which dealt with decent people, was therefore a sentimental fantasy” (1993, p 149). Then there were those who condemned The Harp in the South for political reasons. “Because I wrote about poor people I was a Communist. On the other hand because I wrote about poor people I was a capitalist – I wrote about them only to jeer, or, alternatively, to make money” (1993, p. 149). Park was severely shaken by the “wolf pack” (1993, p 153) and struggled to understand the commotion. All she had wanted to do was write a novel 106
about a Sydney suburb, Surry Hills, a place she knew well from having lived there after arriving in Australia from New Zealand in 1942. She had made it into the setting of the poverty-stricken Darcy family, Irish immigrants living at Twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street: an alcoholic father, a long-suffering mother, and two daughters who realised early in life that this was all there was and would ever be. It was not the most optimistic of stories, but told with humour and written with a journalistic eye and within the tradition of literary realism. Park’s literary supporters like Tennant, Devanny and Vance and Nettie Palmer “gave literary reasons” for the “outburst against the book. The public had a pinched, hysterical cultural imagination, they wrote. These self-righteous ravers either were not readers, or were burdened with a modified illiteracy” (1993, p 157). Park, although acknowledging that “the realism of the story and the locations” might have “shocked” people, was not at all convinced. She compared her book to that of Cleary, “far tougher than mine” (1993, p 158), that did not “attract any flack at all” (1993, p 158), and came to the conclusion that people were “not objecting to the story, but to the writer” (1993, p 159):
I was a woman and I was not an Australian. In an age when the words should not and ought not, with or without justification, were profusely applied to women, I had stepped over the invisible boundary line. Similarly, though Jon Cleary with photographic realism depicted an underclass of Sydney society, he was an Australian, an insider, and thus allowed to do so. I was a New Zealander, a foreigner, and could not be permitted to do the same (1993, p 159).
It is important to acknowledge that Park drew these conclusions from the uproar because factually she appears to be only half right. The fact that she was a woman did draw attention, with, for instance, Robert Campbell from Surry Hills writing in The Sydney Morning Herald: “If the story was really written by a woman, then I am very sorry, for it destroys all the nice things I have believed about women’s minds” (Campbell 1947, p 2). The second of Park’s assumptions is less clear. Although there seems to be no published comment denigrating Park’s authority on the ground of her being a foreigner, it is clear that she felt herself to be one. This is evident from her autobiographies and her work: in her autobiographies, for example, she focuses on her mother-in-law, D’Arcy Niland’s mother, who was, Park writes, “totally discomposed by this foreigner” (1993, p 19): “She felt she had to bite 107
someone and the stranger seemed the logical person” (1993, p 51). “Barbara knew nothing about me and didn’t want to know. She had no interest in my background, family, achievements, aims or opinions. I had sprung fully-fledged into her life, a kind of freakish manifestation more than anything else” (1993, p 70). Migration, Park wrote bitterly, was like “climbing a cliff” knowing you could die there (Park 1992, p 293). The question remains, though, what ‘foreigner’, in this context, means. Does it describe national foreignness, as Park suggests? Is it ethnic strangeness (which seems unlikely, given the fact that a white New Zealander did not and does not seem to have much ethnicity in Australia)? Or does it, especially in the case of the mother-in-law, simply denote family clannishness? Whatever it is, Park felt her outsidership keenly, and deemed it the reason for the harsh criticism towards her work. Thus we can consider her depiction of the migrant minority, for instance the Irish-Australians, to be in some respect a deflected migrant fiction grounded in the author’s own experience. Park had experienced the homesickness, the alienation and the desperation of the migrant: in Surry Hills she had literally shared the life of the Irish, Chinese, Italian, German, Jewish and Dutch who had hoped for streets paved with gold and had instead found excruciating poverty. It was part of the reason why she wrote The Harp in the South. Not only did she share the migrant experience with the people of Surry Hills, but the fact that she was from elsewhere had given her the advantage of looking at this world with “new eyes” (1956, p 180), as husband D’Arcy Niland said, while to him it was “boring old stuff” (1993, p 136): too familiar to write about successfully. With The Harp in the South Park would write the first book where she took up the case of other outsiders inside Australia and it would become the consistent focus of most of her writing for adults. From The Harp in the South trilogy to the winner of the 1977 Miles Franklin Award, Swords and Crowns and Rings, Park’s central figures would be the stranger, the non-native, the Other. These outsiders would come not just in the shape of the migrant, the foreigner, although her novels are populated with all sorts of wandering nationalities. Rather, Park kept coming back to the question of what makes someone an outsider and what constitutes belonging. Most of her characters would be, as Stevie Wonder sang, “in it but not of it” (Wonder 1976). Her themes would remain the same: the juxtaposition of the core community and those on the periphery, inside and outside at the same time: first the Irish, both part of Australia and very much separate from its dominant Anglo culture. Then non-English-speaking migrants, caught between being hailed as necessary for the existence of the new 108
Australia and being treated as strange and threatening to the core culture. And lastly Park focussed on the Aboriginal people of both Australia and New Zealand, whom she depicted as at home but not accepted there. Other writers have, of course, written about class, family, religion and community, but in Park’s case the concern always centred on that one basic query: who is inside and who is outside, and what are the forces driving that distinction? Focussing on a small part of her oeuvre, I will try to show that not only did Ruth Park, despite a lack of academic recognition, have a voice in literary Australia, but it is also a very distinct and interesting one, rooted in and inspired by the migrant experience. For that purpose my analysis will concentrate on the following Park novels written for adults: firstly the Surry Hills trilogy (The Harp in the South, Poor Man’s Orange and their prequel Missus), and one other on Sydney, this time situated in the Rocks (The Power of Roses); one of her books about New Zealand, The Witch’s Thorn and her Miles Franklin winner, Swords and Crowns and Rings. This choice gives me the opportunity to look at Park’s work over time, a period stretching from 1948 (The Harp in the South) to 1977 (Swords and Crowns and Rings). The themes will be broadly divided into three categories: emigration and its consequences for identity; the by-products of outsidership, and the importance of home. These are roughly the same topics as referred to by Wenche Ommundsen (2007, p 78) and defined as preoccupations of migrant writers in chapter 4, thus showing that the subject matter of a white, English-speaking migrant writer like Park is very similar, if not the same as the writers Ommundsen refers to as more accepted “ethnic minority writers” (ibid).
Ruth Park migrated to Australia in 1942, after a plan to take up a job at the San Francisco Examiner was thwarted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour and all travel was cancelled. By that time, Park had been corresponding with the young Australian writer and journalist D’Arcy Niland for years, encouraged by her mentor and schoolteacher, sister Laurencia. Although Park was initially less than eager, soon she and Niland realised that they shared a similar obsession with writing. Niland was the eldest son of a big Irish-Australian family with an alcoholic father who hit his mother. He had been schooled in poverty and was used to taking any job he could to survive. Niland had, like Park, tried his hand at short stories and journalism since he was able to read. Park was suitably impressed by the stories the young Australian sent 109
her: “They were all excessively gloomy, what he later referred to as of the leper- meets-madman school, but I could see very well that this unknown, scrappy young man had a powerful talent” (Park 1992, p 244). Park herself had been writing from a very early age as well, “on butcher’s paper and the back of the kitchen door. I didn’t know it was writing, I called it ‘putting things down’” (1992, p 38). She wanted to be a storyteller, but the family was very poor and could not afford to have her formally educated. With the help and encouragement of the nuns in her school, she started publishing stories on the children’s page of the New Zealand Herald, and finally became a copyholder in the proofreading department of the Auckland Star. There she met people like the Australian writer Eve Langley, whom she admired (“quoting Keats, Montaigne, Epictetus” (1992, p 255)), while in equal measure pitying her “constant state of half- hunger”, and Langley’s “mind [that] quaked with the wretched foreboding of an animal in a trap” (1992, p 256). Park’s upbringing as a child of poverty also informed her future stance in matters concerning politics and religion, and even with regard to outsiders and belonging. The socio-economic situation of the Parks was dire and became even more difficult during the Great Depression. When the young writer-to-be only translated the political turmoil and poverty around her as obstructions to her ambition (“As I understood it, being a poor man’s child meant that I would in some inexplicable way be blocked from learning how to be a proper writer when I grew up”(1992, p 61)), her father educated her to the wider implications. He told her about the relief camp he was forced to work in after his business had gone bankrupt: the frostbite, the cold, the hunger, the desperation, men dying on the job or being fired when they were too sick to continue working. Her father also took her to political meetings, because he wanted her to get out of the books and “find […] real life” (1992, p 201). Park’s verdict, after attending these gatherings, and even some riots, was that political parties could not be trusted, because they all condemned the “poor devils” (1992, p 202). Even the newspapers “were shameful. Obviously management was of the opinion that it was moral to starve but immoral to riot” (1992, p 203). Only
the churches were admirable; their leaders may well have reproached their adherents for disgraceful behaviour, but they also spoke out boldly and even 110
radically on the economic crisis. They agreed to a bishop that it was the system that was at fault, that the Government’s Depression policy had crippled the country (1992, p 208).
Park’s attitude to religion was, even in those early days, ambivalent. Brought up a Catholic by her Irish-Swedish-New Zealand mother, she felt beholden to the nuns who gave her the education and encouragement she so desperately craved. At the same time she resented many of the official policies of the church, especially with regard to women. Park’s view of religion and morality was a practical one: when people needed food, you did your best to supply some; when their children had no clothes, you knitted a garment. Hers was the St Vincent de Paul school of Catholicism: hands-on, angry at the wrongs of the world, and motivated, from having lived through poverty herself, to right them; more Jesus-inspired than driven by an institutional notion of God. Later in life she would turn away from Catholicism after a visit to Rome, but her appreciation of the practical aspect of religion, any religion, would remain.
It is impossible to say how many fellow New Zealanders entered the country the year Park did. Not only were trans-Tasman voyagers exempt from otherwise normal visa rules but statistics were only sporadically kept because of the war. Until 1961, New Zealanders were registered under “other British” and were therefore indistinguishable from migrants from the British Isles. What can be said, is that in 1942, 0.6% of the total population (and 5.9% of the overseas born), or 43.610 people living in Australia, had been born in New Zealand (Price 1971, p A78). As Brigid Magner observes, “there is a dearth of serious commentary” regarding the fact that “considerable numbers of New Zealanders migrate to Australia” (Magner 2007, p 360), and “expatriation between the two countries is rarely mentioned in literary historiographies” (2007, p 359). The fact that the “boundary definitions are less distinct” is, according to Magner, probably the reason why these expatriates, especially writers, are not “credited with the insight gained by distance” (2007, p 360). Magner comes to the conclusion that New Zealanders “are liminal in a double sense, since their experience of alienation as expatriates is not recognized, because it is not believed to exist” (2007, p 360). In comparing Park to Langley and the New Zealand writer Jean Devanny, Magner argues that they “shared a similar 111
understanding of the perils of expatriation”, (2007, p 362) which, in Langley’s case, she describes as “a mixture of two lives” (2007, p 366), and even “dislocation” (2007, p 367). Of course there has been longstanding literary traffic between New Zealand and Australia. For example, the AustLit database cites 34 New Zealand-Australian writers, starting the count in the late nineteenth century. Magner’s diagnosis of “dislocation” is very clear in both the life and the work of Ruth Park. Focussing for the moment on her life experiences, and her own recollections of those, Park remembered her migration with a mixture of dread and exhilaration. Looking back, Park wrote that “the huge golden continent and I had not met tranquilly; as with all immigrants I had reeled before that abiding shock wrongly called cultural, but more intimately related to climate, mores, language and personality” (1993, p 18). Alone for most of the time in tiny, dirty lodgings in Surry Hills, she tried to get a grip on almost debilitating homesickness, seeking “a frail psychological shelter” (1993, p 28) in writing children’s fantasy stories and anything else that came her way. Even more disconcerting was the fact that when she returned home to New Zealand after a few years, she realised that she did not belong there anymore either, and that belonging, in fact, had become unattainable:
What a queer thing it is that the exiled always expect everything at home to be exactly the same when they return. And those at home expect you to be the same excited, reckless little girl in a green suit made by her mother. ‘You’ve changed,’ said my mother, and I could not disguise from myself that she said it accusingly […]. People take change in others as an undeserved personal affront. They never say, ‘You’ve changed. Isn’t that wonderful?’ No, they sigh. Probably change in a person who had been absent for some years is an uneasy demonstration of the instability of things, the invalidity of the baseless concept of permanence […]. I knew that ever after I would be like a migrating bird, home in two places, always going from one to the other, loving each equally. In truth, I had become just like a million other Australians – those who are called New (1993, p 100).
This sentiment, of being permanently in-between, is reflected by many of Park’s characters, especially the Irish-Australians, who struggle with the two sides of their hyphenated identity. Particularly the consequence, “a long and empty life on the outskirts of other people’s families” is what haunts them (Park 1948, p 80). To most Australians, Park’s identification with other, “New”, non-English- speaking migrants, was counter-intuitive. As Anna Haebich, talking about demographer Wilfred Borrie, notes: “It was a reflection of the popular assumption 112
that ‘migrant’ meant non-British, that Borrie, himself a migrant from New Zealand, did not think to trace the history of the sizeable population of New Zealanders of mainly British background then living in Australia” (Haebich 2008, p 109). It is a complicated duality: whether Australians regarded her as a migrant or not, Park certainly felt that she had a riven identity and addressed it in her novels.
Park and Niland married a couple of months after Park arrived in Australia. She “didn’t know a single soul at her own wedding. She could quite easily have broken down and wept from homesickness, only she felt it wasn’t the thing. When the [Irish] priest came along ten minutes later she felt better, for he too was a stranger in a new land. They shared a freemasonry of homesickness” (1956, p 18). The couple’s working life was precarious from the start. Both absolutely obsessed with writing, they did everything possible to keep themselves afloat, writing journalism, short stories, children’s books and stories, radio plays, while supplementing their income with working in shops or on the railways. After a year in Surry Hills, they did the same thing in the outback: Niland sheep shearing or doing manual labour during the day and writing at night, Park cooking, fruit picking, book keeping and driving a taxi, writing when there was time. Out of every ten stories they wrote, they sold only one or two, making just enough money to eat and pay for paper and postage. After their family grew, Park and Niland had to be especially prolific to survive and that made them commercial as well as literary writers. In the literary climate of the time, this was a difficult position to inhabit. Writing in Literary Democracy and the Politics of Reputation, Richard Nile discusses the rejection by the literary establishment of commercially successful author Ion Idriess. With influential people like Vance and Nettie Palmer convinced that it was the writer’s obligation to “educate a community about its deeper realities” (Nile 1998, p 140), Idriess was in their eyes a writer who engaged in “sentimental distortion of some genuine experiences and impressions” (Ibid). This criticism of writers who did not want or could not afford to be “martyrs to the cause of serious writing” (1998, p 143) was even more apparent when it came to links between literary aesthetics and political and nationalist choices. Most Australian writing between the 1930s and the 1950s could be broadly classified as realist. Realism in general is “an exceptionally elastic critical term, often ambivalent and equivocal, which has acquired far too many qualifying (but seldom 113
clarifying) adjectives” (Cuddon 1999, p 728), but is commonly understood to use an almost reportorial style to write about everyday subject matters, in “ways that make them seem to their readers the very stuff of ordinary experience” (Abrams 1999, p 261). Jennifer Strauss, writing in The Oxford Literary History of Australia, describes the often-used Australian version, social realism, as “non-lyrical, non-judgmental, concerned with the lives of ‘ordinary’ people” (Strauss 1998, p 125). The idea of “writing the real Australia”, as opposed to writing about Australia from a colonial (British) point of view, had been “value-laden” from the start, driven by “bush- centred nationalism”, en route to a “distinctive identity” (1998, p 119). Some realities had to be re-written to fit this identity and this was apparent in the way authors represented, for instance, women and Aboriginals in their work. Apart from nationalistic reasons for writing in a certain way, party politics also became a factor. As a response to the Depression and the rise of fascism, many of Park’s literary contemporaries veered away from social realism into socialist realism. They agreed with the Communist Party of Australia that writers had to advance the social condition, and therefore were required to produce novels that not only described the situation of, for instance, poor people in the bush or the inner cities, but also had to propose methods for change. Many of these writers would go on to form the Realist Writers Group in 1944, convinced that their role in Australian society went beyond just writing literature: that critiquing and in doing so, changing, Australia, had to be their objective.
Ruth Park was confronted with this dilemma especially after she wrote The Harp in the South, and later Poor Man’s Orange and The Power of Roses. Writing in the Communist Review at the beginning of 1960, Jack Beasley, in his report to the Fourth Conference of Communist Writers, was scathing about Park’s work:
what a picture she gave of the despair of poverty, the ‘romantic slum life’ and too, correctly, of the squalid housing. But what poor broken wretches her workers are. And to them Ruth Park preaches the virtue of resignation, the salve of pie in the sky. There are no militant workers, no struggles in her novels, consequently a false picture of the working class (Beasley 1960, p 32).
To Beasley, realism had to be “the artistic method of the rising revolutionary class in society, the only class that dares look life in the face” (1960, p 31). The writing of ‘real’ social(ist) realist writers, Beasley went on to say, 114
will be biased, will be partisan, on the side of the revolutionary class and its allies. This is the determining feature of socialist or revolutionary realism. This bias is not a subjective idea of the writers, nor is it only the product of a humanistic compassion for society’s victims. It is the reflection in the mind of the revolutionary writer of the objective bias of history, the inexorable course of social development to socialism (1960, p 31).
In this, he thought, Ruth Park had not only failed, but had betrayed the people she was writing about. Looking at the responses to The Harp in the South, both in the letters to the paper and in the reviews, a similar disapproval is noticeable. Or, to be more precise, critics of the book could not seem to make up their minds about where Park was positioned in relation to the ‘politics of poverty’. Marjorie Barnard, writing in Southerly, proposes that the novel has
two incongruous strands twisted firmly together, a surface realism and an underlying romanticism. It is, analysed dispassionately, a marriage of incompatibles. The author makes all the gestures of a rather defiant realism but is at heart a romantic, even a sentimentalist. The Harp in the South is in the tradition of Australian novels easy in style, but at the same time it offers so much to the reader’s sweet tooth that the critic can only wonder if its ‘realism’ is more a décor than a conviction (Barnard 1948, p 183).
At the other end of the political spectrum, there was The Bulletin, which conceded that Park’s “outlook is socially impeccable”, but added: “so much so, indeed, that the resultant sentimentality and propaganda considerably reduce the literary value of that chapter and of subsequent references to it” (Bulletin 1948, p 2). The propaganda in question, according to The Bulletin, was connected to “the tendency to look sympathetically at ‘the poor’ as a class instead of regarding them detachedly as individuals”, which, according to the article, led to an “inclination towards morbid themes” (ibid). This consistent labelling of Park’s work as sentimental would be a recurrent issue in the criticism throughout her literary life. I would suggest, though, that there is a possibility that Park’s migrant sensibility (diasporic nostalgia and yearning) inclined her towards the sentimental. Also, depictions of radical political action, as required at this time in Park’s career, required characters and writers who felt enough ‘at home’ to take (literary) risks for a better future. Ironically, despite Park’s perceived lack of political activism, partly as a result of The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange, Sydney city council started its program of gentrification of Surry Hills in the early 1950s. “Steam shovels and bulldozers grunted and clanked 115 where the goat-footed slum children had scampered”, Park wrote in her first autobiography in 1956, proudly adding that one of the new blocks of flats was “called Harp House” (Park 1956, p 192). Some of the letters-writers at the time of publication of The Harp in the South accused Park of depicting the poor of Surry Hills in a false light, undermining their already fragile status. One wrote: “As the daughter of an Irishman, I strongly resent Ruth Park’s novel, with its sordid, cheap portrayal of people whose only fault is their lack of material goods” (Courtney 1947, p 2). Robert Campbell of Surry Hills even suspected that the novel “was written for the purpose of belittling the Irish people and their institutions” and he took offence, because the Irish “were the main pioneers of Australia” (Campbell 1947, p 2). People also doubted that the book would do the Australian poor any favours or help them politically: “The judges of the Herald’s literary competition claim that the winning novels are ‘realistic’ and designed to awaken the social consciousness. It is doubtful whether novels of this type awaken anything but a prurient curiosity” (Ellis 1947, p 2). The whole issue of Park’s depiction of the Irish is an interesting one, because it shows two important points. First of all, Park portrays the Irish as ethnic and different from the rest of white Australia, as a group that is not really part of the core at all. This, in turn, leads to the conclusion that the label currently employed to describe the core, ‘Anglo-Celt’, is a very recent one, which has only been used in response to even more marginal ethnicities. What most correspondents primarily objected to, though, was that Park, in writing The Harp in the South, was seen to have damaged the nationalist cause: “To think that in a young clean country (clean as compared with the older countries) such unadulterated filth should be given first prize, and put out to the world as representing Australian life, makes my blood boil” (Anderson 1947, p 2). Why, one of the letter- writers asked, “should Australia, with all her beauty to choose from, have to go to the sewer for her literature?” (Coombe 1947, p 2). This fits in with the adage of “writing the new Australia”: slums and poverty were symbols of the old world, while the ideal Australia was rural and clean. For some people, Park’s novel was ample proof of the fact that the whole of Australian literature was therefore in trouble. The book, worried N. Gibson from Randwick, “emphasises again the persecution complex apparently suffered by our authors, who, ignoring all the decent and fine things our community has to offer, invariably indulge in mental self-flagellation, evidently believing to 116
sound happy and pleasant is not ‘artistic”’ (Gibson 1947, p 2). The Bulletin agreed: “Where is the great Australian sense of humour? Where are the grand conceptions of a fighting, adventurous, generally happy people? Where the optimism of the pioneers? All buried, it seems, beneath a festering heap of Leftist rubbish at the bottom of Granny Herald’s ashcan” (Bulletin 1947, p 13). Criticism of Park’s work, then, seems to have been threefold: Irish-Australians, who were sensitive of being pictured as a poor peripheral underclass: an Australian cultural ‘cringe’, demanding that every word about the country be positive; and a political objection, labelling Park as naive and sentimental. I would suggest, though, that Park’s ‘outsider’ position allowed her to see and feel what ‘polite’ readers did not (want to) see, which on the one hand gave her the license to express this in print, but also made her vulnerable to attacks. Clearly, writing about migrancy was still a fraught affair in ‘pre’-multicultural Australia. Even if those migrants were white and English-speaking, like the Irish. And even if the writer was a migrant herself, who had first-hand knowledge of the social conditions most migrants were confronted with. Park did not really answer her critics, apart from a short letter in the Herald, where she defended the residents of Surry Hills, and maintained that she had written the book “solely as an exposition of the fact that splendid characters, full of honesty and loving kindness, can exist against a squalid and often tragic background” (Park 1947, p 2). Niland was a little more specific. In his view, his wife had
simply and truthfully delineated what experience life has given her. She writes about what she knows. I do not think she attempted to give her novel social significance. She had no need to. That was there naturally, because characters and their environment are necessarily interrelated; no matter whether they adopt that environment or rebel against it. […] Books like The Harp in the South are far more moral than the escapist stuff served up from imaginative experience. This brand of literature is completely immoral and unethical, since its effects are obscurantic, complacent and truth-warning – the bromide pill of delusionary living, thinking, and experience (Niland 1947, p 109-110).
Niland and Park shared the living conditions of the other outsiders in Surry Hills, not because they wanted to make a political stance, but because their writerly ambitions made it the only option. In their collective autobiography, they described part of the day-to-day circumstances; Niland sleeping on a “couch like a sarcophagus”, Park on “a camp stretcher with a feeble wire mattress that not only sagged in the middle but rolled under at the sides” (Park and Niland 1956, p 156). “Lino blowing up in ripples 117
above the cracks in the timber” and “sand [blowing] steadily under the door” (1956, p 163) made living even more difficult. In addition, there was “milldew [spotting] all our clothing” (1956, p 164), “fungus on the walls” (1956, p 135) and children getting sick or being attacked by rats and spiders. It was also, as Park cheerfully noted, “a Mecca of wonderful material, which came to her. She did not have to go to it” (1956, p 132).
Broadly speaking, the golden age of realism ended in Australia with the 1955 publication of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man and the start of a new movement in fiction: modernism. Not only did White use different narrative methods in this and his subsequent novels, but he introduced another way of looking at Australia: less nationalistic, less didactic and leading away from the myths and cultural clichés reflected in much of the literature up to that time. As Kerryn Goldsworthy sees it, White initiated a style of literature that asked questions instead of giving answers and that had more affiliations with art than with education. Slowly the writer became more than just a cultural worker in the service of nationalism and/or of establishing what ‘Australia’ was essentially like. Goldsworthy adds that White and his contemporaries won themselves the freedom to write art for art’s sake. In doing so, they experimented with new techniques, characteristic of European and American modernism, as well: stream of consciousness, symbolism, fragmentation, the use of disjointed timelines and narrative perspectives and, in White’s case, mysticism. Characters in novels changed as well and became stranger, and even strangers, like the German explorer in Voss. White especially started to introduce protagonists who were far removed from the quintessential bushman: “‘an orthodox refugee intellectual Jew, a mad Erdgeist of an Australian spinster, an evangelical laundress, and a half-caste Aboriginal painter’ as White described them” (Goldsworthy 2000, p 126-127). He was also one of the first Australian writers who became interested in what the ‘New Australians’ had to offer. As White wrote in 1960:
A great many ignorant native-born Australians go out of their way to encourage New Australians to drop their own standards in favour of the dreary semi-culture which exists here [but] there are also a great number of civilised Old Australians who are hoping that the migrants […] will bring something of their own cultures with them (White quoted in Goldsworthy 2000, p 127).
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Australian literature had, in a way, come of age; it had opened itself up to the world, both allowing outside influences and moving further and further away from its insularity and prescriptions. In this manner it was getting itself ready for the new world of multiculturalism and writing by and about migrants, as discussed in chapter 3. One of modernism’s ‘victims’ was social realism, famously dubbed by White “‘dreary’”, “‘dun-coloured’”, and the offspring of journalism (ibid). Nevertheless, Ruth Park would continue to write in that style to the end of her career. With her background in journalism, she was trained to start narratives with the facts, then doing research: collecting stories, characters, sounds, smells, and finally melding those two strands. Non-fiction was her favourite writing-style and she was never ‘just’ a novelist, making documentaries and radio programmes, writing plays, children’s stories and journalism. The non-fiction techniques needed there, she used heavily in her novels: there is an almost photographic quality to both her characters and the situations they find themselves in. Her dialogues are picked up from the street by someone with a great ear for distinctions and particularities in language. Although sometimes cringe-worthy to modern ears, Park’s characters carry their heritage in their speech. “‘Yer only jealous, dearie, ‘cause I made meself felt,”’ the Irish grandmother in The Harp in the South says (Park 1948, p 133), while expressions by the Chinese grocer, Lick Jimmy, always have the stereotypical extra ‘l’: “‘Mlind! Make wlay”’ (1948, p 80). Although Park used her personal experiences, she wrote to give voice to those who could not tell their own stories (another journalistic trait). She wanted her readers to “see a familiar reflection in the looking-glass” (Park 1993, p 301). This, in Park’s opinion, called for a style that readers could understand; an approach that had none of the complicating features of modernism, which would be a barrier between writer and audience. Content over form, giving voice over making art: it was a choice that made her a popular writer, one that the reading public, and especially the migrant reading public, could identify with. That this worked is apparent in the way Kate Veitch starts her write-up of one of the very few interviews Park ever allowed:
At dinner, the night before I was to interview Ruth Park, I met a fellow who had migrated from Italy with his family when he was a little boy, in the 1950s. His parents, great lovers of books but knowing little of the country to which they had come, somehow discovered Ruth Park and, as they acquired 119
sufficient English, they read her novels aloud to their children. ‘She introduced us to Australia!’ he told me, face alight, and you could have sworn he was talking about a beloved aunt or family friend. Many thousands of readers, I suspect, think of Ruth Park in this way (Veitch 1993, p 7).
Park would have been pleased with this status, of someone who was seen as both a voice for and a guide to migrants.
Most of Park’s books sold well, won prizes and were translated in many languages. Park even made it into the Bulletin’s 2006 list of ‘Most Influential Australians.’ Maybe it was this popularity that “has tended to deter academics; or perhaps her work, though skilful and effective, has not always been produced to coincide with whatever has been currently fashionable in academic circles”, as Jill Greaves suggests (Greaves 1996, p 244). The fact is that Park’s work inspired very little serious academic scholarship during her life and when it did, the verdict tended to be that Park was an old-fashioned writer with little to say about Australia – that she was, at most, a writer of “picturesque, naturalistic accounts of the poor and the working class” (Carter 1997, p 131). My point in this thesis is that Park did not just write about the poor and the working class, but about a very particular group within that category: migrants. Usually she focussed on the Irish, but they were always surrounded by a cast of Germans, Italians, Dutch and Chinese immigrants to this country. Park’s novels are sociological studies (but born from experience) into the consequences of migration (like poverty), and the way the different ethnicities interacted and were viewed by core Australia.
When The Harp in the South was written, the Irish in Australia, and especially in NSW, were positioned very much as in-between-people. By the time Park started her first book, the Irish had not been made an integral part of the Anglo-Celtic core yet. Australia’s core was still Anglo-Saxon and the Irish were considered less than white. As Jon Stratton remarks, the Irish, up to the end of the 19th century, had been racialized and excluded from whiteness, instead seen as “a kind of white Negroes” (Stratton 2004, p 231). In the Australian context, they were racially compared to Aborigines, even considered “intellectually inferior to Aborigines, ‘utterly useless”’ (2004, p 233). Reasons for this, Stratton maintains, were their religion, Catholicism, which was seen as “an unacceptable heresy” (2004, p 234), their poverty and their language (Gaelic). Only around Federation time did the Irish gain the status of 120
“whites” and that was not, Stratton says, because the opinion about the Irish had suddenly changed, but because, with the influx of even less desirable migrants like Asians, it had become necessary to construct an idea of a racially homogeneous, white population within the new Australian state: a concept that could be used to protect the nation from incursions of even more racialized Others (2004, p 234). Freud’s insight on the way belonging is produced through exclusion offers an apt metaphor for the absorption of the Irish into an Australian nation now faced with yet another, ‘more different’ outsider, the Chinese. That did not mean, of course, that the Irish, halfway through the 20th century, were considered equal to the Protestant English, Welsh and Scottish mainstream. They were still deemed to have ethnicity, where those with British descent did not, and because of their associations with both the Catholic Church and the Labor movement, the establishment looked upon them with distrust. “Irish Catholic”, as Patrick O’Farrell reflects in his seminal work on The Irish in Australia, was a “derogatory label” that was associated with poverty, ignorance, divisiveness, inferiority and something “somehow foreign to Australian life” (O’Farrell 2000, p 302). After 1937, though, things were slowly changing. The proclamation of the Irish Republic that year, and, even more of a shock to the Irish-Australian system, the 1948 separation of Ireland from the Commonwealth, made clear that especially for the new generation, usually born in Australia, Ireland had less and less relevance. To the old guard, this sentiment was abhorrent. O’Farrell mentions the Reverend A. Cleary, who, confronted with young Irish indifference, argued
that if one was of Irish origin nothing could change that fact, and it could not be ignored, in the way a parent could not be ignored: justice was demanded by one’s origins. He conceded that many ignored or downplayed their Irishness because they were ashamed of it as allegedly inferior, looked on with contempt by the rich and powerful: this attitude was a problem of the slave mind (2000, p 300).
But by the 1950s, O’Farrell writes, “the old Irish Australia, that of heritage and sentiment, had been almost totally absorbed in its Australian concerns” (2000, p 307). The new Irish migrants were young, better educated (usually tradespeople), more often single men than families: people who “derived [their] Irishness from militant nationalism” (2000, p 307), and not from the church or the old mythology. These people had chosen to be in Australia, and if they did not like it, they took a ship or 121
even a plane back. Forced assimilation, part of the credo of the White Australia Policy and something the Irish had always objected to, became less of a problem because of the more flexible nature of the new Irish migration. Park’s work, with its roots in the Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, mostly focuses on the older generation: the people who had themselves migrated, and their children. She acknowledges that there were differences between the two, but mostly seems to agree with Cleary that Irish origin cannot be ignored. The Harp in the South tellingly starts with locating both the group, the place, their class and their dislocation: “The hills are full of Irish people. When their grandfathers and great-grandfathers arrived in Sydney, they went naturally to Shanty Town, not because they were dirty or lazy, though many of them were that, but because they were poor” (Park 1948, p 5). Only a few lines later, Park marks her subjects: “Even the names of the streets tell the story of those old emigrants [my italics] who came looking for roads cobbled with gold, and found them made of stone harder than an overseer’s heart” (1948, p 6). Even in this first book, Park flags the start of the generational shift, announcing that for one of the granddaughters “Ireland was inconceivably far away. It seemed strange and enchanting that her own Grandma had come from that land; it was almost as though Grandma were an old fairy woman from another and more fantastic world” (1948, p 151). Throughout the book, Park portrays the Irish as battlers: not just fighting poverty and the elements, as any quintessential Australian battler would, but also struggling with the conflicting demands of the Irish community inside and the strange Australian world outside. It is the migrant condition that is Park’s unmistakable focus. Surry Hills might consist of “hideous backyards full of garbage cans, tomcats, and lavatories with swinging broken doors and rusty buckled tin roofs”, but “these were all things they were used to” (1948, p 223): the place is a home away from home, and the book therefore ends with the sentence “I was thinking of how lucky we are” (1948, p 225). Given the choice between an identity one could understand and feel, and the perception that “the rest of Sydney persisted in looking down on [you]” (1948, p 59), there seemed to be no alternative course of action than to turn inwards. Better to belong to a poor migrant community, than to be alone and displaced in the world outside of it. Yet in her second novel – the sequel to The Harp in the South, Poor Man’s Orange (1949) – Park makes her readers understand that there is a price to be paid for this type of insular and protectionist behaviour. The first 122
threat to the little migrant world the Irish had created comes with the government announcing plans to replace dilapidated Surry Hills with modern flats. Park describes the impending disintegration of the neighbourhood as undermining the Irish- Australian identity, causing people to retreat even further into the periphery of Australian society and outside of the core. Another consequence of the closed-off attitude of the older generation of Irish migrants in particular, is that their children are, sometimes literally, dying within the confines of the community they worked so hard to protect. At the start of The Harp in the South, Park introduces the two Darcy daughters as girls full of promise. In Poor Man’s Orange they pay the price for their parents’ choice of isolation: Roie dies in childbirth, while Dolour loses part of her eyesight and her belief in a better future. “A dull fatalism entered her heart. For a long while, all her life perhaps, she had wanted to get out of Surry Hills. But that was all gone. She belonged to Surry Hills; she was from it and of it, and God had made up his mind that she was going to stay there” (Park 1949, p 79). Despite all the positive aspects of the neighbourhood [“the old man tending his blind and crippled friend on the park bench, the returned soldier with no legs, sitting in the window whittling wooden toys, as un-bitter as a bird” (1949, p 173)], Park’s protagonists are starting to realise that getting out (and taking the risk that comes with leaving the safe migrant cocoon) is the prerequisite to surviving in this new world. Even “mumma” is “tired of battling against things without making an inch of headway. It was the same with Hughie; it would have been the same with Roie. The slums would have sapped her, too” (1949, p 155). Four years later, Park takes another look at the Irish, this time a couple of suburbs away, in the Rocks (The Power of Roses, 1953). Now she tells the story of a community that has lost most of its morality and almost all of its will to live. Babies are being abused, children killed by other children, and instead of a community sharing its meagre means, loneliness, desperation and hunger has set in. Fragmentation and alienation have led to an abasement of self, a loss of belonging even to oneself. One of the very few moneyed Irish migrants remembers “how the feeling of solitariness had grown as she got older. The more accomplished she became [part of the outside, Australian world], the lonelier she felt, for none of her accomplishments were related to the deep grieving longings in herself” (Park 1953, 213). This is not an optimistic conclusion by any means, but to Park it is evidently the only outcome of displacement: losing one’s community without gaining access to a 123
new one enacts a price. Significantly, this is reminiscent of writing by more unambiguously multicultural writers like Rushdie, who proposed that migrants “define themselves – because they are so defined by others – by their otherness” (Rushdie 1992, p 124-125). The loss of a clear-cut home and identity has caused them “to experience deep changes and wreches in the soul” (1992, p 210). Park herself experienced one of those soul-wreching moments in 1959. The death of her father in New Zealand, coupled with the first signs of Niland’s illness, launched her into a day- long episode of amnesia. She “did not recall [her] identity” (Park 1993, p 212) and felt as if she was “standing on nothing in the middle of nothing” (1993, p 211). “Part of [her] memory never returned. The years between 1957 and 1959 are largely a blank” (1993, p 213). On the ferry to Manly she did not recognise Sydney and “was lost in my head as well as in time and place” (1993, p 212). It made her understand the dislocation and confusion even better, but also the (momentary) lack of optimism and hope.
Living alongside the Irish migrants in the slums and mirroring Park’s own experiences there, are migrants from other countries. Park’s characterisations of these people are very typical of how White Australia portrays foreigners at that time. Lick Jimmy, the Chinese owner of the corner shop in Surry Hills, for example, is a kind, generous man, but also someone who is “not destined to learn the intricacies of Surry Hills English” (Park 1948, p 18). He, the Irish migrants think, will always be an “old heathen” (1948, p 215), and is therefore a target for abuse. The others, such as the Italians, Dutch, Germans, come off even worse. ”’What I say is, they ain’t got no business allowing foreigners in this country. Chows, yes. Nobody can wash a collar like a Chow. But not blasted Dutch. Anyone with corners on their head is next best thing to a German, I always say”’ (1948, p 145). Park’s Irish-Australian narrator labels them as “foreigners, Australian born, perhaps, but still with the black and antique seal of their ancestry upon them” (1948, p 115): when Roie is attacked and loses her unborn baby, her assailants are a group of drunken Dutch sailors. Park describes these people, with their different languages and cultural mores, as foreigners even to the Irish outsiders: another degree of strange, über-migrants. Yet there are similarities too, such as a shared dislocation:
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Uncle Puss heard the loneliness in the young man’s voice. He looked up to see the sadness and it was there, as it was on nearly every migrant face – an indefinable sense of loss and out of placeness. He said: ‘They’re all gone, your people?’ ‘Yes, killed in Amsterdam. A long time ago.’ ‘You speak English mighty knacky’, said Uncle Puss. ‘All gone, and yourself little more than twenty, and all alone in a strange country’. He sighed. The fatigue nearly swamped him (Park 1953, p 157).
More than anything, though, Park sees her non-English characters as plunged into self-inflicted banishment and discrimination, caused by their own strangeness (in the eyes of the other migrants). In The Witch’s Thorn (1951, one of Park’s novels about New Zealand), the German mayor, Wedesweiler, is the villain of the book. On the one hand Park acknowledges that there are reasons for his bitterness, one of them the fact that the New Zealand government “put him in an aliens’ camp” during the First World War (Park 1955 [1951], p 8), another that he is abused by every drunken villager who felt like it: ’”Who’re you? You oughtn’t even to be here, you stinking Hun. Whyn’t you go back to Germany, heh? Squareheaded bastard. Look down on me, do yer? I’m twice the man you are, born and bred in New Zealand. Good Scotch blood. Who’re you? Can’t even talk English”’ (1955 [1951], p 141). At the same time, it is his European arrogance and anomalous behaviour that Park seems to say causes the response of the other villagers. Park’s narrator describes Wedesweiler as having a “continental face”, looking “with meditative amusement at the little country men about him, these small colonial tradesmen who showed in their every gesture the apprentice years of their nation” (1955 [1951], p 32-33). He sexually assaults one of his daughters, Sieglinde, because she is “his only visual bridge to the Old World. In her face he found all the memories his exile had lost him” (1955 [1951], p108), and tells her that he will “not have any peasant’s hands mauling your body, or slobbering over that face that would be of high blood were we not forced to live in this pig-pen of a country”’(ibid). In the end, Park’s narrator remarks that Wedesweiler’s “oddity as a foreigner was immediately paramount in the minds of those who had occasionally been tempted into treating him as one of themselves” (1955 [1951], p 143). Foreigners, Park’s narrator’s conclusion is, are always just that; foreigners:
‘What has kept me here all these useless years?’ [Wedesweiler] wondered. Not the woman, not the children, or the town or the country, nothing but lassitude. He spoke a sentence in his own language and its texture was strange and harsh upon that alien air. But there was no one to hear it or understand it. He had got 125
under the skin of Te Kano, but Te Kano had never been interested enough to want to know what went on under his (1955 [1951], p 151).
One of the very few novels by Ruth Park that strays from the migrant-driven investigation is Swords and Crowns and Rings, the book that won her the 1977 Miles Franklin Award. That does not mean that this is not a novel about outsiders, though. Jackie Hanna is what Park calls a dwarf. His childhood friend and the girl he will later marry, Cushie Moy, is treated badly by her posh, frustrated mother and absent father. Both these characters are considered strangers: Jackie by the broader world, Cushie by her family. The book follows their travels, geographically and psychologically, for about 25 years, and throughout, Park makes it clear that everything that happens to both of them is the consequence of their status as outsiders. With the Depression as the backdrop and people looking for scapegoats, Jackie and Cushie are victimised over and over again: forced into marriage, abortion, poverty and shameful dependence. Swords and Crowns and Rings may be seen to voice Park’s final verdict on the position of outsiders, an enquiry into the dichotomy of Them and Us. The novel pitches rich against poor, educated people against non-literate manual labourers, politicians against voters, men against women, children against parents, migrants against Australian-born people, the powerful against the powerless. In most cases, this struggle turns violent, and instances of inhumane and immoral behaviour are plentiful: Jackie being forced into marriage after he is unjustly accused of getting somebody pregnant; a farmer who does not allow poverty-stricken travellers into the warmth, causing somebody to freeze to death; German migrants who are coerced to change their name and give up their language; women raped and beaten simply because they are women. Everybody, it seems, has enemies. For others, to survive with a modicum of self-respect, they have to blame somebody else – capitalism, the government, colonial Britain, your children for disappointing you; only then is it possible to feel some sort of belonging, have an identity to be proud of. In this book, literally the whole world feels out of place, ignored, alienated. Even nature takes its revenge, by causing floods, droughts or fires. Here Park seems to say that this is the nature of the human condition: for strangers, there is a harsh price to pay. In an attempt to create at least some light in this darkness, Park offers up love and trust as mitigating factors, but immediately undermines this by having them violated and proven false time and time again. 126
As previously mentioned, despite their popular success, Park’s writing has not attracted much academic criticism. However, reading what is there, both in academia and outside of it, makes for an interesting exercise. Out of everything written about Park in Australia, only one person acknowledges migrancy as a theme in Park’s writing: Joy Hooton, in her essay for a special issue published by the National Library of Australia in 1996, called Ruth Park: A Celebration. Focussing on The Harp in the South trilogy, Hooton remarks: “Writing to some extent as an outsider, but with a wealth of experience of the Australasian Irish-Catholic heritage, she was able to capture both the culture’s familiarity and its strangeness within the context of the raw environment of the inner city” (Hooton 1996, p 6). Hooton argues that Park, because of her migrant experiences, was able to write
from within, and without, a culture. The Irish experience of deprivation, poetry and exile is deeply implicated in her writing, […] but it is presented with the same mix of imaginative empathy and detachment as her realisation of other cultural groupings, whether ethnic or familial (1996, p 2).
Intriguingly but maybe coincidentally, Hooton herself was born and raised in the UK and therefore shares her migrant status with Park. Other critics only briefly mention Park’s New Zealand origins, but do not connect this to her work. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, for instance, positions The Harp in the South as a book with “a colourful range of […] characters [meeting] adversity with humour and courage” (1998, electronic page 1), while The Bulletin, at the time the novel was published, deemed “its central theme, insofar as a theme can be detected, [as] the love-life of the heroine Rowena” (1948, p 2). Marjorie Barnard, writing in Southerly, also in 1948, maintained that “the novel chronicles the vicissitudes of the Darcy family of Surry Hills”, with “local colour in the way of bugs, refractory stoves and street fights, laid on thickly but balanced by hearts of gold and a happy ending” (Barnard 1948, p 183). Barnard thought its “chief intention may well have been to depict and highlight life in Surry Hills” (Barnard 1948, p 183-184). Meanjin’s Gavin Casey considers the book a “study of Australian-Irish slum-dwellers” (Casey 1948, p 133), although not a very good one. Lastly, in one of the very few broader examinations of Park’s work, F.C. Molloy assumes that Park wrote the novel because “she was fascinated by the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the district” (Molloy 1990, p 127
317). Molloy locates the theme of the book in Park’s “wonder at the contentment of the people” of Surry Hills (1990, p 318), and regards the fact that the novel features characters with nationalities other than Irish as one of the “unresolved contradictions” (Ibid). To this critic, Park’s choice of the Irish was not based on their migrant status, but on “the knowledge that for an Irish Catholic family, solidarity and a sense of obligation from one generation to another were sacrosanct” (ibid). This tendency, to judge Ruth Park’s work in a rather cursory manner, is evident throughout her career. The Southerly review of The Witch’s Thorn starts out by acknowledging that here Park is “[continuing] her studies of the underprivileged” (Ashworth 1955, p 222), but then simply summarises the storyline. The Bulletin considers the book to be about “the vicissitudes of a little illegitimate girl in a little New Zealand village” (1952, p 2), and describes Park as “not a little ray of sunshine” (1952, p 2). A year later, The Bulletin’s estimation of The Power of Roses is that it is “still a hovel-novel dedicated to the Glory that is Grease” (1953, p 2), “everywhere breaking into poetry that finds its inspiration in the confrontation of the beautiful and the frightful” (Ibid). The magazine sees Park as a lover of “poverty and the poor” and “her people” as “showpieces from a collection of a connoisseur” (ibid). The general opinion on Swords and Crowns and Rings, finally, is voiced by Peter Pierce in Meanjin, who contends that the novel describes “movements of historical change in the national life and in the lives of individuals” (Pierce 1978, p 65). According to Pierce, it is a simple “story of a misfit who succeeds through his own courage” (1978, p 66), a “tale of unsentimental friendships and unexpected kindnesses”, as well as “a love story with a happy ending” (Ibid). The bigger issues Park throws up in her novels, in particular those connected to the migrant experience, do not seem to resonate.
In describing most of her characters as outsiders (usually as a consequence of migration), Park also vividly details the poverty that often accompanies this status. Every single novel discusses the difficulties with getting a job, a place to live, enough food, warm clothes, milk for the babies, medicine, protection against rats, bugs and disease. The way Park portrays this fight follows the pattern of her increasingly negative view on the position of outsiders. In The Harp in the South people are still coping by employing a cheerful vitality, sharing what they have and believing it will somehow get better, some day. In Swords and Crowns and Rings, written almost 128
thirty years later, distrust and hatred have become necessarily tools for survival. Living on the periphery of the Australian nation has led to exclusion, and by the end of Swords and Crowns and Rings Jackie feels the only way out is to go into politics himself. After attending a speech by the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, he realises that “the feeling of incipient power had knocked at him then, even a sense of inevitability, when he had thought: ‘I could do this better.’ His interest in the world of politics and power, half-glimpsed as yet, was like a seductive landscape hidden in mist” (Park 1977, p 432). Here the gloom induced by naturalistic observation is highlighted by the urge to clench your fist and confront the powers that be. It might also be necessary to remark that apparently for Park fatalism (as in her novels about Irish and other migrants) goes with ethnic difference, while the drive to change the world is associated with physical difference. Park’s conclusion seems to be that, in this comparison, it is better to be a poor dwarf than a poor ethnic. In The Power of Roses (1953), Park leaves Surry Hills to focus her attention on another Sydney suburb, The Rocks, and one tenement building in particular. Again, it is populated by Irish and other migrants, struggling to remember why they are there and why their parents have scrimped and saved to pay for their passage: “to give [us] a chance to take our tilt at the world” (Park 1953, p 53). Park’s protagonists have to remind themselves of this, because their daily reality is less than ideal and Park uses vivid and even accusative descriptions of the physicality of poverty:
The two Simiches, who had seven brothers and sisters, looked as though they had been lightly sketched in pale pink chalk. Their brittle little legs were transparent, like the flesh of fish, and their pale blue eyes, sunken and bright, looked out at the world with a mouselike expectancy. Deep in their rickety little chests lived tuberculosis, a humming hive, and beside them as they played strolled Death, watching their lungs as a gardener might watch a blossoming bed (1953, p 23).
As a response to all of this – the hunger, the disease, the living-conditions, the hard work without ever getting anywhere, the inhabitants of what Park cynically calls “The Jerusalem”, turn on each other. People start stealing from each other, a child rapes and murders another child, a mother beats up her baby just to give her some relief from the strain she is under. “Its emaciated, monkey-like body was patched all over with dull red fingermarks. Even on its chest and bloated stomach was the pattern of fingers, and a blue welt stood out like a band across its furry scalp” (1953, p 20). There is 129
deceit and betrayal within, violating The Harp in the South’s earlier code of moral conduct, where the poor help the poor. Here the most vulnerable and desperate are preyed upon by their peers, and in the end there is no redemption, no way out, nothing that saves them. Poverty, compounding the alienation of migration, has started to destroy people’s body and soul. From a ‘migrant writing’ perspective, this vision will not be appealing either to the aspirational migrant reader or to the critic looking to place migrant writing into the national canon. However, for that critic and for the national mainstream reader, it is a useful shock tactic that reveals the ghetto of migration and its social effects, as a corrective to the established ‘Anglo’ national myth. Park, being both a migrant and by this time more part of the Australian core, was perhaps the perfect writer to present this reality.
Another section of Australian and New Zealand society that Park examines in her work, is that of the native populations of both countries. In reading her representations of them, it is important to remember that she is writing while the White Australia Policy is still very much alive. Park cannot help being influenced by this in her novels, especially those that actively address colour and race, written in the 1940s and 1950s. The most prominent examples are The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange, which address these concerns in Australia, and The Witch’s Thorn, that looks at it in New Zealand. In the two Surry Hills-novels, the colour-focus is on the relationship between daughter Roie and Charlie Rothe, who is introduced as “part- Aboriginal”: Charlie is black, but only just. Roie’s father Hughie says about him that “Charlie spoke and behaved like a white man, and looked like one, too, except to the wise eye of a man such as himself, who had been in the outback more times than he could remember” (Park 1948, p 206). Hughie is relieved when Charlie tells him that children born to him and Roie will probably be white. Also, Charlie’s mind is put at ease when Roie tells him that she doesn’t object to him “having a bit of dark blood” in him: “It’s such a long time ago, and it wouldn’t matter to me if it was only one generation ago. There are lots of lovely dark people” (1948, p 207). Roie’s perceived lack of judgement makes Charlie “realize that there was no black-white problem with Roie. Either people were nice, or they were not. Her wisdom had deeper roots than that of the people who put colour before character” (1948, p 207). Park’s inclusion of Aboriginal characters highlights the idea that while the national story might be that all whites are migrants, Irish migrants are more ‘black’ than the invisible white 130
mainstream. This, of course, is reminiscent of Stratton’s description of Irish in England in the 1880s, where they were denoted as “white Negroes” (Stratton 2004, p 231). Here Park seems to say that the fact that Irish migrants and Aboriginals are both outsiders (and both black, in a manner of speaking), ties them together. Their outsidership is their commonality and their reality of not being accepted by ‘really white’ Australia turns them into one group to belong to. It is not difficult, though, to read the White Australia principles in this exchange: for a relationship between a white girl and a black man to succeed, the black man has to turn white. As Anna Haebich argues when she quotes sociologist Alastair Bonnett: “the universalist promise of equality demands the submission, the self-obliteration, of those to whom it is ‘offered’. ‘We can all be one’, it is suggested, ‘if you become like me’. This was the credo of assimilation – the pay-off for equal rights was cultural conformity” (Haebich 2008, p 43). White, in these novels by Ruth Park, is the norm, and the Aboriginal man can only be trusted with his precious white charge if he does not reject absorption into the white world. These are “narratives of assimilation [that] see ‘the problem of race’ as being resolved through the Other being ‘just like us’” (Hughes 2004, p 59). And in this case, it is even more interesting: despite the fact that the core sees both as ‘non-white’, the Other-Irish is rendered ‘white’ – and therefore almost part of the core – by juxtaposition with Aboriginal ‘blackness’. There is a twist in this, though: before Roie met Charlie, her experiences with white boys had been bad, and “Charlie is presented as having something special that white boys in the novels lack: ‘There was something different about his voice, a soft breathiness that was not in other men’s’” (2004, p 54). To Roie, Charlie is the man who saves her from her life; he makes her “feel remote from the usual muddlements of her thoughts” (Park 1948, p 199). He even nurses her back to health after a miscarriage. Her mother notices that Roie regains “her health at so rapid a rate that it was almost as though the strong heart that beat in Charlie Rothe’s breast pulsed life and vitality through Roie’s own body” (1948, p 203). Aboriginality is seen as a life-giving force, something that cures these ‘white’ people from the ‘muddlement’, the confusion, of their migrant status. ‘Native’, in Park’s understanding of the term, is here literally opposed to ‘foreigner, migrant’. When Mumma tells Hughie that she is scared of the fact that Charlie has some “nigger in him”, Hughie tells her that “It’s real Australian and no matter how bad that is, there’s none better” (1948, p 205). In the way Park presents the outcome of the colour-dilemma, everybody wins: the 131
Darcys by becoming part of “real” Australia, Charlie by turning ‘white’. After Charlie and Roie marry, colour and race are never mentioned again: by the physical unification the problem has been solved. Interestingly, it is not always black turning white that Park puts forward as the solution to the colour-divide. In The Witch’s Thorn, it is the white girl Bethell, who rages against her race and wants to change it. “‘I’m not white people’”, she tells the Maori family she wants to become a part of: “‘Aren’t we all the same underneath, whether we’re Maori or not?”’(Park 1955, p 175). Here Park steps on the next rung of the assimilationist ladder, by advocating colour-blindness, and even superiority for the underdog. In response to Bethell’s plea, the Maori father, Georgi Wi, muses to himself:
He knew there was some difference, but where it was he could not be sure. Sometimes he felt that white people were exactly the same as Maoris except that they were more bad-tempered, and worried more about everything. Other times he knew that any race who took it for granted that it was better than another just because it had a white hide must of necessity be of inferior intelligence. But this could not be expressed fully in English, which was, as Georgie understood it, a pretty clumpfooted language (ibid).
Throughout The Witch’s Thorn, the Maoris appear as naïve, but somehow better, endowed with a deeper spiritual, emotional and psychological understanding of the world around them. An example of this lies in the confrontation between Georgie Wi and Father Finn, the town’s Irish migrant priest. Georgie’s understanding of Catholicism is that “God was a Maori like me”, because “he likes to do so many things the Maori like to do”, like going fishing and having parties (1955, p 19). In his mind, Jesus’ forty days in the desert make perfect sense: “He went into the bush to have a bit of a think” (1955, p 20). Burdened by the rules of the Church and the letter of the Bible, it takes Father Finn a while to come to grips with it, but by the end of the book he realises that
Down under that stupid, fat brown race, there’s a brain which does not think like mine. It’s concerned with fundamental things, with food rather than politics, with sex, parenthood, old age, death, rather than with the trivialities, the smooth, mechanical trivialities of the white man’s life. In other words, it’s concerned with the things God put it on earth to be concerned with, rather than with the superficialities a civilized society has created by its laws and within its own limitations (1955, p 210).
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‘Aboriginality’ or ‘indigeneity’, here, is something to strive for, something to be preferred over the “limitations” of white society: something nobler, worthier of appreciation, more righteous. This, of course, makes it close to the idea of the Noble Savage, but I suggest that with Park it has more to do with the concerns explored in her Surry Hills novels: in a world of migrants, being ‘native’ is the ultimate ideal, a state that brings a resolution of the outsider status. In keeping with this dream, Park touches on the discrimination against Indigenous peoples in both countries only briefly, suggesting that it is a temporary problem that can be solved by mutual respect offered up by warm-thinking and -feeling individuals. Bethell, for instance, like Roie, needs saving, and Hoot Gibson, Georgie Wi’s son, is presented as the man for the job. When they, at the end of the book, finally get the chance to be together forever, Park describes the scene as a homecoming, in which Bethell is not just absorbed into Hoot’s world, but into his family as well. ‘Changing colour’ gives her the right to belong to the clan: protected, no longer an outsider. Home.
So, who really belongs in Park’s work? The short answer is: nobody does. However, there are degrees of non-belonging. In an unpublished story, read by Park at the Sydney Writers Festival in 1995, she delivered what can be viewed as her literary testament and manifesto. It is the account of Mr. and Mrs. Coutts, old farmers who have lost their farm and who come to Sydney for the Australia Day celebrations. During their stint on the steps of the Opera House they become confused about what constitutes the Australian population these days: their grandchild, half Greek; a Turkish-Australian man who talks about Gallipoli as an invasion; the young Afghan- Australian journalist, who is a descendant of a camel man they knew years ago. What baffles them most is the dichotomy of strangeness and familiarity they feel: these people are part of the same nation they belong to, and yet they see them as “strange strangers” (Park 1995, p 1). At some level they feel betrayed by the country that “needed men and women with durable hides, long stringy muscles and big hands. Their life very often beat them to the ground but required that they get up again” (ibid). All their lives they have worked hard for Australia, still only to feel “displaced, on the outside of things” (1995, p 3). At the end of their lives they have to acknowledge that although humans forever try to structure their world and fit in, they will never succeed in doing that: “Funny, he thinks, how we believe we’re shaping the country. And all the time the country is shaping us, no matter who we are or where we 133
come from. […] Creating its own heirs” (1995, p 4). This view echoes a sentiment Park had voiced almost forty years before, describing her arrival in the country as a migrant:
Australia itself, as a land, is indifferent to its visitors and inhabitants. An ancient, worn-down continent, it has seen too much, known too much, to give humankind either hostility or welcome. Mankind is transient; not so its opal bones. And Sydney, that stony crocodile of the eastern coast, is likewise indifferent. Live or die, it’s all the same to Sydney town (Park 1956, p 52).
Whatever you do as a migrant, true belonging never seems attainable. The author who became famous for producing children’s stories of national icons like the wombat was, at heart, a migrant who depicted the migrant experience: an existence riddled with anxiety, uncertainty and a very tentative sense of security. Always ‘other’.
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CHAPTER 6
ALEX MILLER: THE STORY OF THE INTIMATE AND PRIVATE LIVES OF US
On the 20th of April 2010, Alex Miller was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award for his novel Lovesong. It was the seventh time the literary judges regarded one of Miller’s writings worthy of an honorary mention. In 1993 and 2003 he had won the prize for The Ancestor Game and Journey to the Stone Country, while The Sitters, Conditions of Faith and Landscape of Farewell were put on the shortlist in 1996, 2001 and 2008, and Prochownik’s Dream earned a place on the longlist in 2006. The Miles Franklin was only one of the accolades Miller received during his more than twenty years as a novelist. Nominated for almost every literary prize in and even outside the country, his trophy cabinet – if he had one – would contain, amongst others, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, a Centenary Medal for Service to Australian society and Literature and the 2008 Manning Clark Award, where his oeuvre was recognised as an ‘outstanding contribution to the quality of Australian cultural life’. Then, of course, there was the ultimate recognition, a spot in the pantheon of Australiana, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, where two portraits of Miller by Rick Amor are on display. All this has located Alex Miller as a quintessentially Australian writer and earned him a place in the Australian literary canon. In the context of this thesis, it is especially interesting to note that The Oxford Literary History of Australia even categorises Miller, a little mystifyingly, as a “non-migrant Australian writer” (Lever 1998, p 325). But Alex Miller did migrate and in my view this experience informs much of his work. Experience is the important word here: to Miller, migration is not 135
an abstract concept, as it is for many Australian-born writers (and critics), who are fascinated by the role it plays in ‘the story of the nation’. His is the actual getting-on- a-boat version: the lived, embodied event rather than the cerebral notion, informed not by an interest in a cultural phenomenon, but by the deeply rooted emotions relocation brings. It is not just a topic for Miller, but the topic, one he keeps coming back to in every book he writes, trying to find the words that describe every facet of the experience and its consequences. In doing so, Miller addresses all the quintessential migrant themes: language and silence, fragmentation and displacement, absence and difference, nostalgia and history, landscape and belonging, home and story, are at the core of all of Miller’s work. Alex Miller was born in 1936 and raised in a poor neighbourhood in London, the son of a Scottish father and an Irish mother. In an interview I conducted with Miller on 5 and 6 June 2008, he stated that his first realisation of non-belonging came to him when he was a child. Because his parents were working class and not English, it was “made very clear” that they were not “part of the ruling culture”, and this made it difficult to find a “meaning and a purpose” to life (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June). Miller’s father, who resurfaces in various guises in many of his books, was traumatised by his years as an infantryman during WWII, which left him wounded and unable to work after the war. The novel Landscape of Farewell reads as a study into both the psychology of this complicated man and the difficult relationship he had with his son. The book not only addresses the matter of guilt and the silence that is the product of this, but also recalls an incident that was, as Miller only recognised after the writing, “straight autobiography, from the point of view of the emotion and the dynamics of the situation” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June). It concerns a severe beating the boy took from his father, because he realised that the older man needed an outlet for his “reasonable” anger and the boy felt he “owed it” to him: “I have his name, I am his son, an extension of him. That makes me responsible” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June). Living with the consequences of poverty and a parent who “had lost faith in the human project” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June), coupled with a desire for adventure, eventually instilled in Miller an overwhelming need to get out, preferably to a place that was “unconnected to family, past and history” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June). In The Ancestor Game, Miller describes this yearning in an almost mythical way: “Look for something you can’t name, […] and call it Australia. A thing will 136
come into being […]. A land imagined and dreamed, not an actual place” (Miller 1992, p 259). “From my European perspective, Australia looked like this fantastic blank page, free of the ‘too much’ of European history. I freed myself, in a way” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June). The idea of Australia had been born when Miller, after leaving school at 15, worked as a farm labourer in Exmoor, an experience he wrote about in The Tivington Nott. One day an Australian migrant showed him a book on Australia, where Miller found a photograph of a group of stockmen staring into the distance, a great empty landscape in front of them. A year later he convinced his parents to let him go, and in 1952, at age 16, Miller arrived in Australia by ship. He recalls the first time he saw the land he had been dreaming about:
The sun was rising and then I saw this thin line. I clearly remember the excitement, the ‘Christ, this is finally it!’ A magical moment. The place that is ready for me, the place I am going to inhabit, the place that will be mine. A clear, clean tabula rasa. Not theirs, not full of stuff, but mine. Ready for me to write on (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June).
To the young Miller, the first thing that struck him was the different way he, a “boy from the wrong side of the tracks” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June), was treated in his new country. In contrast to what he had been used to in England, Australia did not seem to mind about class distinctions, only interested in his skills as a horseman and not his background. What was apparent though, was the level of racism:
I answered an advertisement in the paper that said ‘no Yanks, Poms or Boongs need apply’. After I’d been [in that job] for a while, I finally had the courage to say I was from England. They said: ‘O really, what part?’ It didn’t matter anymore. A lot of people I knew used very racist language towards Aborigines, although they had Aboriginal friends. But that was ‘Frank, mate, he’s all right’. They were theoretical racists, not practical ones (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June).
For a few years Miller worked as a stockman in Queensland and New Zealand, a cleaner at Myers, a spruiker for a ferris-wheel, and in the public service in Canberra, before matriculating to study at Melbourne University, graduating with a BA in English and History in 1965. Wanting to write, but not mastering the craft yet, he bought a farm in Araluen – where part of The Sitters is situated – breeding cattle, cutting wattle bark for South African tanneries, growing vegetables and organising the 137
local mail run. At the same time he wrote three “pre-novels” “about major issues of the day”, that had “no warmth, no heart” (Miller 2003, radio interview, 9 May). A breakthrough came with a visit to the farm by Miller’s friend Max Blatt, a Jewish refugee from Silesia. Miller admired Blatt for his brilliant mind and for what he had managed to overcome in life. As Miller tells the story, Blatt
slammed down the [latest] manuscript and said, with faint bitterness and disgust: ‘Why don’t you write about something you love?’ […] It was a bullet in the heart. It staggered me, but it taught me how to write. From then on I only wrote about my intimate secret world. Fuck the rest of it. Writing about something else is like going into a well that is empty. You go back and back and bring up buckets of dust (Miller 2003, radio interview, 9 May).
Miller’s first real work, the one that proved he was ready to be a writer, was, not surprisingly, an ode to Blatt. ‘Comrade Pawel’ was a short story, published in Meanjin in 1975, about an element of Blatt’s experiences during the war. Blatt was moved, and told a relieved Miller: “‘Alex, you could have been there’. There was a flash of joy: finally I knew I could do it” (Miller 2008, interview, 6 June). The first couple of years after the publication of ‘Comrade Pawel’, Miller mainly occupied himself with theatre. His first play was produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company and he was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Australian Nouveau Theatre, as well as co-founder of and writer for the Anthill Theatre in Melbourne, and founding member of Melbourne’s Writers’ Theatre. In 1988, his first novel, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, came out, followed the next year by the one he actually wrote first, The Tivington Nott.
1952, the year Alex Miller arrived in Australia, constituted something of a watershed in the history of British migration to its former colony. Between 1945 and 1952, most of the British migrants arrived with the help of Assisted Passages Schemes, which had been negotiated between the two governments shortly after the war. The English-born dominated at around 85% (Jupp 2001, p 314), and a quarter of them came from Miller’s region of London and the South-East. More than half of them were between the ages of 15 and 44 and had a working-class background (2001, p 315). The median amount of capital they brought with them was 289 pounds (ibid). Britain had just come out of the war, rationing and food shortages were still the order of the day and people wanted to get out of Europe, partly in fear of a repeat 138
performance, this time with a Soviet enemy. The Australian economy, on the other hand, was growing, and desperately needed skilled workers to keep the momentum going. “Excess demand for labour exceeded 2.5 per cent […], despite the large intake of migrant labour under the assisted British and the Displaced Person schemes” (2001, p 314). In 1952, things started to change. Australia experienced an economic recession, while things were looking up in Britain. Apart from economic reasons, Australians and Britains were also slowly altering their expectations and opinions of each other. As Andrew Hassam maintains, British migrants arriving straight after the war were met with respect, giving the example of T.G. Davies, the general-secretary of the West Australian ALP, welcoming a boat-load of British tradesmen with: “If you had the guts to go through six years of war, then you have the guts to be decent Australians” (Hassam 2005, p 79). According to Hassam, this attitude changed fairly quickly afterwards. This was caused by “the waning of the war in Europe in the Australian cultural memory”, growing “calls for an independent non-British Australia” (2005, p 80), and a stronger self-confidence of the country down under. Another reason for the revision was that British migrants, from 1952 onwards, were starting to agitate against their living conditions. Being housed in hostels that were cramped and expensive, migrants took to the streets of NSW, Victoria and South Australia. In November 1952, this led to violent clashes, with blockades being built out of cars and stones thrown at police (2005, p 81). The new immigration minister, Harold Holt, accused the migrants of “communist-inspired” violence and compared them very unfavourably to the “New Australians”, migrants from “continental Europe, who were deemed to be less complaining about hostel conditions than the British” (2005, p 81-83). What he forgot to mention, though, was that the British, who usually arrived as families, spent on average 83.3 weeks in hostel accommodation, compared to 45.5 weeks for the more flexible Europeans, who mostly arrived individually (2005, p. 84). Hassam asserts that all of this led to the ‘Whingeing Pom’ stereotype, that took hold around the early 1960s, with the British even being denounced for “un- Australian” behaviour (2005, p. 86). In his opinion, relations did not improve in later years, and actually deteriorated when the special position of the British was abolished under the Whitlam government in 1972. In 1977, the minister for primary industries, Ian Sinclair, blamed the British for “importing the British disease of industrial unrest” (2005, p 88), after which a public discussion ensued on whether these remarks could 139 be classified as “racist” or not. The Sun newspaper felt this belonged to “the theatre of the absurd” (2005, p 88), while Tom Uren, the acting leader of the Opposition, maintained the word was an accurate description of Sinclair’s sentiment (2005, p 88). Hassam maintains that a 1977 letter to the Sydney Morning Herald symbolised the confused feelings amongst Australians with regard to British migrants:
Sinclair’s outburst […] shows the impossibility of Australia ever becoming a republic. The Commissioner for Community Affairs, Mr. Al Grassby, no longer allows us to be rude about foreigners, but fortunately our present Constitution ensures that the Poms are not foreigners, so we can say anything we like about them (2005, p 90).
It is interesting to note that the current (very partial) academic focus on British migration to Australia is fairly recent, and led by academics who are themselves migrants with a British background. James Jupp, Jon Stratton, Sara Wills, Andrew Hassam and James Hammerton all were born in the UK and may therefore be more receptive to the British migrant story. James Hammerton and his writing partner Alistair Thomson (also a migrant, but in the opposite direction) explain their motives for writing about this particular migrant group in Ten Pound Poms – Australia’s Invisible Migrants like this:
We are not arguing that non-British immigrants have received undue attention or unfairly favourable treatment. Australian attitudes and policies did discriminate against immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and the struggle for a more just and multicultural society is one of the most important chapters of contemporary Australian history. But the history of postwar immigration makes better sense if the British are included in a story which records the common and distinctive features of their migration (Hammerton and Thomson 2005, p 12).
This quasi-apologetic tone is revealing of the diffident manner in which the discussion about British migrants in Australia is being conducted. In a review of the study, Andrew Hassam explained why these white, British migrants became, in his words, “invisible”. “Compared with non-English-speaking migrants, British migrants”, he contends, “were not sufficiently different from Australians”. “Especially after the introduction of multiculturalism”, Hassam reasons, “the Poms were not exotic enough to assume a multicultural ethnicity” (Hassam 2006, p 339). 140
Most of the British-Australian academics agree that British migrants have been largely invisible in the Australian migration story, and ‘blame’ this on the fact that in Australia, British migrants were regarded as “less migrants than transplants to British settlements overseas” (Wills 2004, p 338), “for whom talk of assimilation seemed irrelevant” (2004, p 333), because it was taken for granted. Sara Wills, writing about Mrs. Barbara Porritt, embraced as Australia’s millionth migrant in 1955, maintains that the
most crucial ‘missing’ chapter in the story of the arrival of the millionth migrant, and of postwar British migrants to Australia more generally, is of migration as an event that profoundly affects identity and sense of place, resulting in complex changes in relationships with the ‘homeland’ and creating a transformed sense of self and community in Australia (2004, p 334).
Wills contends that Barbara Porritt’s assimilation was expected, as seen in the implications of what the media neglected to mention: “No detailed knowledge of her hometown or family is considered relevant. We are told of no family that she leaves behind, no special places or buildings, no memories, no sense of place, nothing that might tie her to Britain” (2004, p 343): hers is not a migrant story, but one of re- placement, where the subject is a blank slate, without past or identity. Her past and identity, because they are British, are considered the same as those of Australian women, given that they are both part of the Empire. Especially when compared to the waves of ‘truly Other’ migrants who arrived at the same time – Europeans who were neither English-speaking, nor part of the Empire nor, in many cases, considered ‘really’ white – the assumption that somebody like Mrs. Porritt was, in a way, story- less, is understandable. This story also echoes Ruth Park’s lament that her mother-in- law “had no interest in [my] background, family, achievements, aims or opinions. [I] had sprung fully-fledged into her life” (Park 1993, p 70), however unwittingly exposing how New Zealand’s relationship to Australia too fell neatly in the imperial paradigm that united Britain and Australia. To many Australians, the life of a white, English-speaking, culturally similar migrant apparently only started at the moment they entered the country. Wills goes even further in suggesting that “it could be argued that in Australia, the incorporation into the story of the nation of a white woman was used to represent the values of ‘hearth’ against ‘immigrants’” (2004, p 345). White British migrants, therefore, are perceived in Australia to have no ethnicity and to be therefore ‘safe’, while Others are ethnicised and consequently deemed 141
dangerous. The consequence of this binary, is that “British migrants have been subject on occasion to post-imperial forgetting” (Wills 2005, p 94).
In substantiating this same proposition, Hammerton and Thomson point to a couple of categorisations used in Australian institutions. The first one consists of “many Australian libraries, which use the index headings ‘migrant’ or ‘migration’ for memoirs by postwar migrants from non-English-speaking countries, but not for memoirs by postwar British migrants” (2005, p 10). Then there are the historians, who “have also neglected postwar British migrants”, with the noted exception of Reg Appleyard (2005, p 11). Lastly, Hammerton and Thomson claim that British migrants were “ignored” in the 1970s and 1980s, when large-scale projects were undertaken to “record and publish the oral histories and written testimonies” of migrants, as “part of the agenda of multicultural politics” (2005, p 11). This seems to fit into the analysis of migrant, ethnic or multicultural writing presented in chapter 3. There we saw the categorisation change over time, and include only “cultural traditions which do not derive from either England or Ireland” (Gunew et al 1992, p viii). Jon Stratton focuses on the idea that issues of difference and ethnicity inform the thinking about British migrants. Ethnicity, Stratton contends, is used “as a marker of incompatible cultural difference” (Stratton 1998, p 33): “Ethnic cultures are peripheral to a core culture, named these days as ‘Anglo-Celtic’” (1998, p 10). Stratton wonders “what meaning Anglo-Celtic culture [has] for the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish migrants” (1998, p 81), seeing that they are both a migrant (and therefore outside of the national story) and British (and as such “neither ethnicised nor hyphenated”, forming “the backbone of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ Australia” (1998, p 83). In ‘Not Just Another Multicultural Story’, Stratton further explores this ambivalence of “being both included and excluded in the dominant culture” (1998, p 88). Stratton maintains that British migrants are not considered “‘foreign’ like the new white migrants”, but they are also not Australian, because they are viewed as inferior, “‘identified as Pommies’, negatively compared to Australian stock and Australian culture” (Stratton 2000, p 30). British migrants, according to Stratton, are thus not only “simultaneously denigrated and silenced” (2000, p 31), but if they do not assimilate immediately they are also seen as a “challenge to the legitimacy of the ideology” of multiculturalism (2000, p 32). It is a complicated Catch 22, that leads to a categorisation dilemma for the writers in this group. 142
I want to return here to one of the very few British-Australian writers usually included in the migrant, ethnic, multicultural writers subset: Elizabeth Jolley. As noted above, this is not because Jolley was born in Birmingham, but on account of her mother being Austrian, with German one of the languages spoken in the family home. However, in 2002 Alistair Thomson wrote ‘Landscapes of Memory’ for Meanjin, charting the ‘Migrations of Elizabeth Jolley’. In it, he argues that
The experience of migration was, for Elizabeth Jolley as for so many other migrants, a time of dramatic disjuncture in which time and place – past, present and future – were wrenched out of established patterns and certainties. The voyage to Australia evoked deep, powerful memories and ‘remains a physical and emotional experience which cannot be erased’: ‘At some point in the journey the migrant is hit by the irrevocable nature of his decision. Even if he starts back as soon as he reaches his destination he will never be the same again’ (Thomson 2002, p 89).
The themes Thomson points to in Jolley’s work are classic migrant themes: exile, alienation, loss, making “sense of new places” by “articulating and controlling them through writing”, place and landscape, belonging and memory. “Like many migrants, the Jolleys created physical and imaginative spaces in Australia that threaded together in strange new patterns the warp and weft of past and present places”, Thomson argues (2002, p 90). Similarly, Brian Dibble – who migrated to Australia from America –, and who wrote Jolley’s biography in 2008, calls this an “internal exile” (Dibble 2008, p 158):
The dislocation of Jolley’s migration to Australia was amplified by her earlier British experiences of displacement, and her writings can be read as a species of migrant literature that articulates a longing for belonging and negotiates a resolution in writing to the experience of exile (2008, p 158).
In his biography, Dibble makes sure that Jolley’s readers understand that “Although the term ‘migrant’ is not usually used for Australian writers who have come from English-speaking countries, especially England, nonetheless Jolley was a migrant writer” (2008, p 158). Caroline Lurie agrees, maintaining in the introduction to her second book about Jolley, Learning to Dance – Elizabeth Jolley, Her Life and Work (2006), that “Homesickness and exile combined to inform much of Elizabeth’s writing” (2006, p 3). In what follows, I will show that, as is the case in the work of 143
Elizabeth Jolley, migrancy is a central component in Alex Miller’s writing. Another similarity between these two writers is that critics have some difficulties in making the connection between the work and the migrant experience of its creator.
The first book Alex Miller wrote was The Tivington Nott. It is the story of a young boy from London, who goes to work as a farm labourer in what the English call the West Country, a landscape of moors, hills and valleys. In a short non-fiction article Miller wrote for The Age, called ‘My First Love’, Miller’s first sentence reads like this: “When I was 15, I left school in south London and got a job as farm labourer on Exmoor” (Miller 1995, p 3). In the story, Miller marks the experience as his “first cross-cultural journey”, and says that he was considered by the people in Exmoor to be “a lunatic, a weirdo, an outsider”. Miller makes a direct connection between that experience and The Tivington Nott: “The novel turned out to be a parable of the stranger, a meditation on the power the stranger has to negotiate to find a way into a settled community and to change the community forever” (1995, p 3). In the book Miller sets up the dichotomy between the stranger and the community from the very first page. Miller’s first-person narrator locates himself as “an alien”, and realises quickly that “A local’s always got something extra on you. They can feel the shape of the country in their bones. And they can afford to wait for outsiders to make a mistake. Saying nothing. Being there and waiting” (2005 [1989], p 14). This tension pervades the novel: the outsider always alert for the moment the insiders will lash out, the insiders always suspicious of the outsider’s motives and even of his presence. The Tivington Nott is about the power of the stranger, as Miller wrote, but at the same time it narrates the resistance of the community to that stranger and the difficulties the stranger encounters in his quest to be (temporarily) accepted, let alone fit in. Even language is used to keep him at bay: “You can never be quite sure what they mean. Nothing clear-cut and final about their answers. […] Ask them a straight question and they’ll spit and cough and look over their shoulder, then say something you can’t understand and move away” (2005 [1989], p 43-4). Sometimes the resentment even turns into dimly veiled hatred: “She feels in her bones that people like me […] shouldn’t be allowed. We ought to be banned if governments did their job properly” (2005 [1989], p 67). “I don’t fit and it is obvious. There’s no covering it up by keeping busy. I’m a stranger in the middle of what’s going on. An irritation. Irksome. Spoiling everybody’s fun” (2005 [1989], p 47). The narrator’s response to this 144
dislocation, is to prove that he is worthy of their respect, by doing something dangerous and potentially life-threatening. He joins a stag-hunt on one of the most unpredictable horses in the county, owned by another outsider in the village, an Australian called Alsop. Like its owner and rider, the stallion is “the wrong horse for this place” (2005 [1989], p 19). Miller calls the animal Kabara, without explaining that this is an Aboriginal name for ‘home’ or ‘place to rest’. On this ‘home’, the narrator almost dies trying to establish his worth, but in the end it does not get him any closer to the insider-ship he was after. “Kabara and I are intruders. We’ll always be intruders here, no matter what we do and no matter how long we stay. And if we were to stay, I’m sure the forest would move away from us and establish itself elsewhere” (2005 [1989], p 114). The Tivington Nott was not extensively reviewed in Australia. Most of the critics took the story at face value and viewed it as a book about hunting. In the Australian Book Review, Jennifer Dabbs calls it “the definitive deer-hunting tale”, talking about “Miller’s unique style, which is not literary” [sic], but nonetheless the book has “wonderful writing, imaginative, evocative and [is] totally accessible” (Dabbs 1989, p 47). Dabbs acknowledges that there is a “sub-theme of the outsider searching for meaning and identity in a society firmly entrenched in a rigid and outdated class system”, a theme she calls “universal” (1989, p 47), but she does not connect Miller’s position as a migrant writer to this theme, or explore it further. A year later, in a speech he gave when he accepted the Braille Book of the Year Award for The Tivington Nott, Miller himself said that he considered the book his “first excavation”, “the first feature to be uncovered”, “part of a buried city of great complexity” that has “a confessional nature” to it (Miller 1990-1991, p 30). Since then, in the introduction to the 2005 publication of the book and during our 2008 interview, Miller has elaborated further, saying that not only were the migrant themes of “home, belonging, outsidership and exile” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June) a major part of that excavation, but they were very much connected to his personal experiences as a migrant. Another observation he made during our conversation, was that although he “planted” (Miller 2008, 5 June) the horse’s name in the book as a crucial sign of the importance of these migrant themes – “What about this entire [sic] with the strange Australian name? Kabara? Why give a horse a name like that? What can it possibly mean?” (Miller 2005 [1989], p 94) –, nobody had picked up on it before. 145
One of the few critics to include The Tivington Nott in a broader assessment of Miller’s work, was Peter Pierce, fifteen years after the publication of the book. In his essay for Australian Literary Studies, Pierce states that the novel was “unlike its successors” – a claim I’ll come back to in the course of this chapter – and that it is “a novella, dealing with the relationship of intimate dependence between a youth and the stallion, Kabara”. To Pierce, it “looks at first like a conventional rite of passage” (Pierce 2004, p 299), but turns out to be “Miller’s tribute (enacted once, so it need not be again) to the Romantic powers of memory as inspiration, and as abyss” (2004, p 300). Pierce’s reading of the book points to the way “the animal world endures the assaults upon it” (2004, p 300). Again, amongst other things, the migrant themes of the novel are overlooked, although Pierce, writing about The Ancestor Game later in his essay, does assert that in all of Miller’s books the protagonists are “displaced” (2004, p 304).
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, Miller’s second book published in Australia, has one of his recurrent protagonists at its centre: an Englishman in Australia, this time a young stockman (Miller’s first job in his new country), called Robert Crofts. On the surface, the book looks like a simple love-story between Crofts and Ida, the frustrated wife of his employer. In actual fact, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain is a continuation of a theme he already touched upon in The Tivington Nott: the individual (outsider) versus the group (of insiders). Crofts and Ida Rankin are both strangers. Crofts is an Englishman who does not talk about his family (or when he does, he fabricates a story about them) and who irritates Ida’s husband Ward by how seriously he takes his work. Ida does not feel connected to either her husband or her children, and feels that the only time she was really herself was when she was climbing the highest mountain in the district as a girl. This feat has made her a threatening oddity in the area, where women were not supposed to do things like that. Miller writes about everybody else as belonging to a tribe, and about those tribal members as interchangeable smiling assassins, out to force the outsiders to make a choice: conform and ‘belong’, or keep your individuality and run the risk of being driven out of town. It is this decision that Miller feels outsiders have to make between belonging and selfhood, which is at the heart of this novel. However, the reviewers at the time did not see it like that. Greg Flynn, writing in The Weekend Australian, calls the book a “colonial potboiler”: “heat, rain, incest – 146
it’s a tough, unsavoury life up near Mt Mooloolong in the Central Highlands”. To his mind, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain is about nothing more than Crofts wanting to “savour the action”, “willing to do his share in cementing Anglo- Australian friendship”, while Ida is “just looking for someone with a nice seat in the saddle” (Flynn 1988, p 9). As with The Tivington Nott, it is necessary to turn to the Peter Pierce essay for a broader view of Watching the Climbers on the Mountain. With the benefit of hindsight (Pierce was writing after Miller’s sixth novel had been published), he now could distinguish emerging thematic patterns in all the works and he starts off his analysis of the book in a promising manner, by stating that Miller’s first Australian job as a jackeroo in Queensland “informs” the novel (Pierce 2004, p 302). Although he does not expand on this, Pierce brings up a number of interesting issues nevertheless: “In common with the protagonist of The Tivington Nott, Crofts’ background is occluded. There are no certain answers to the questions: Where is he from? Why is he here? Indeed, he might have emigrated from that book into this one” (Pierce 2004, p 302). The word “emigrated” is intriguing here, because I think that this is exactly the point. At the end of his review of the novel, Pierce states that “its necessity, for Miller, may have been as a first essay in writing of an Australian landscape and rural work that he knew and loved, and as an early stage in that depiction of the terrible apartness of those who must nevertheless live in society” (Pierce 2004, p 303). The “terrible apartness” to me signals that dilemma already mentioned – remain outside of the community or surrender selfhood to belong. Miller is hopeful in this book, in that he gives the migrant Crofts a companion in Ida. This alleviates the weight of the loneliness that individuality confers. In the course of this chapter, I aim to show that Miller loses at least part of this optimism in his later novels, in the end accepting that both choice and outcome (alienation) are inevitable. Following Pierce’s remark about Miller’s descriptions of the Australian landscape, I would suggest that there are, broadly speaking, three distinct ways Miller deals with this here. Ward Rankin, the station owner, has long ago lost interest in his surroundings. He sees the land as hostile, something to escape whenever he can, something that he has given up on after too many years of trying to domesticate it. His descriptions of his property are mostly negative, with a focus on the heat, the flies, the bush taking over. Robert Crofts (a portrait of the writer as a young man) is the quintessential new colonist, working himself into a sweat to organise, categorise and order the bush. He clears, builds, and uses this physicality to do the opposite of 147
Rankin: he wants to forget about his past in his old country by almost literally hacking himself a way to a future in the new one. Then there is Ida, the only one who is connected to the actual landscape and not simply to some idea of it. The mountain she once climbed feels very much like her soul to her, the place where her true identity lies, and Miller portrays her as truly inhabiting every piece of scrub around her. She is genuinely ‘native’, which her husband labels as “eccentricity, a lingering symptom”, proof that Ida is close to being “black” (Miller 1988, p 149). In exploring these three different attitudes to the landscape, Miller seems to be trying them out for size in preparation for a closer look in later writings. I would argue that the interest in landscape and estrangement is also thematically rooted in the migrant experience. It is reminiscent of Elizabeth Jolley, who wrote that for migrant writers especially there is a difference between “stored landscape” and the one you live in and with. “Stored landscape”, according to Jolley, can be used to “heighten contrasts”, “or, specifically in the case of the writer, to create parallels which reveal aspects of human behaviour”. Only by realising the difference between then and now, between there and here, and the role of memory in this process, did Jolley feel the possibility to write about the Australian landscape (Jolley in Lurie 1992, p 99). Miller likewise seems to feel his way into his new country by concentrating on landscape and its effect on old and new inhabitants.
The next book Alex Miller wrote catapulted him into the heart of the Australian cultural establishment, funnily enough with a story that questioned the very existence of ‘Australia’. The Ancestor Game is a big book, a masterpiece in the original sense of the word: something you make to prove you are not an apprentice anymore and that you belong to the professional ranks of your particular guild. In Miller’s buried city, it is the cathedral, complete with hundreds of little sculptures, carvings and stained glass windows, which tell the sub-stories which make up the overarching one. Again, this novel came out of a personal experience, in this case the death of a Chinese-Australian friend, who had always felt “he only partly belonged” in Australia because of his status as a Chinese migrant (Miller in Ryle 1993, p 1). Miller “wanted to validate him”, then realised, in the course of the four years it took to write the book, that “he could have been me” (1993, p 1). The book turned from an ode to a friend into “this enormous project […] challenging the whole sense of homeland, identity, nationality – what this means to us” (Miller 1993, p 3). Naturally, 148
as stated before, the link between the life of a writer and his work is never a literal one. Nevertheless, as Nicholas Birns argues in his analysis of New Criticism, “Inevitably, we know things about an author, and about ourselves, when we read a book. We cannot be wilfully incurious. We may, as the Romantic poet and critic Coleridge put it, wilfully suspend disbelief in order to be captured by the magic of imagination. But it is another thing entirely to suspend our cognition” (Birns 2010, p 14). In my analysis of the life and work of Alex Miller, some connections seem too obvious to ignore. In The Ancestor Game again it appears as though Miller’s migrant experiences and sensibilities inform the work significantly. The next year, The Ancestor Game won three major prizes: the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Barbara Ramsden Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Dedicated to Max Blatt and his wife Ruth, The Ancestor Game is an almost impossible book to summarize, because of the intricately interwoven themes. There are a couple of important main strands that can be delineated, though. The first one is migration and exile and the consequences of those: non-belonging, displacement and alienation. The book starts with English-Australian writer Steven Muir, who goes ‘home’ to be present for the British release of his first novel. He hopes that the book, “which was set in England, might prove the basis for a reconciliation with the country of [his] birth”, and desperately wishes that “something might have healed between us by now” (Miller 1992, p 4). Instead, something entirely different happens. His father has just died and his mother is in no mood to placate her son. She blames him for never writing letters home and just sending his parents a Sidney Nolan monograph – the same one that brought the young Miller to Australia –, something he did as a way of explaining his fascination with Australia, but which was instead seen as “a taunt” (1992, p 6). Muir realises quickly that he has written himself out of his mother’s story of her life and that “she couldn’t wait to have done with me”: “her verdict, it seemed, was that if I’d wished to belong in England then I ought to have stayed” (1992, p 5). Steven’s mother, who, like Miller’s, has a “Scottish husband and an Australian son” (1992, p 8), has, like his birth country, become alien to Steven, who wonders whether he is “returning to Australia in the morning to continue [his] exile, or was [he] going home?” (1992, p 8). Two of the colleagues at the school where Steven works also struggle with the consequences of their migrancy and, like Steven, there are family issues complicating this. Gertrude Spiess has a problematic relationship with her father and Lang Tzu (a 149
typical piece of Miller naming – in Mandarin Lang Tzu means ‘the son who goes away’) has a troubled relationship with his past. Mourning his father, Steven soon realises that Lang and Gertrude in particular, have started to “occupy the vacated homelands of [his] interior, which were in danger of being colonised by the chanting spectre of my father” (1992, p 17): the old home is being taken over by his new friends, who are also trying to come to terms with issues of belonging and alienation. All of them look for a unification of their identity, and their temporary solution is what they call “extraterritoriality, as signifying both an enviable liberation and as a fate more terrifying than any [they] had imagined” (1992, p 94). They realise that going back is not and never will be an option, that it is nothing more than an “old illusion”, a myth “dragged out and given a shake every time there had been a crisis in [his] life”: no longer “available to comfort [himself] with” (1992, p 147). Having left comes at a price and that price is the loss of the old identity. When Lang goes back to the town he was born in, the town that harbours his past and traditions, he is suddenly unable even to remember his own name: “He opened his mouth to shout his name aloud. But he did not know his name. He had forgotten his name. […] It was gone. No hint of it remained” (1992, p 191). Lang is the quintessential Flying Dutchman: “He knew the journey had begun, his travelling, his campaign, his going from one place to another, and he knew that it would only be halted again by death” (1992, p 192). Living with fragmentation as a given is the only thing any of Miller’s protagonists can do. The second theme of Miller’s novel is the intellectual and emotional result of that realisation. The protagonists desperately try to find some purpose, justification and a place of their own, and finally locate it where Homi Bhabha in 1994 said it would be. As Miller writes: “Boundaries, the doctor continued […] exist to be transgressed, they are there to facilitate crossings, not to frustrate them. It is not, he went on […] in those places whose exact frontiers have already been defined for us, but in the regions of uncertainty where definitions have yet to be located, that we must find our place” (1992, p 194). That place, more an idea than a delineated reality, is Australia:
Long for something you can’t name and call it Australia. A thing will come into being. See a golden city on a plain, shining in the distance, and be certain the greatest prize existence can bestow on you is to belong somewhere among 150
your own kind. Let it be Fairyland, an other-world. A land imagined and dreamed, not an actual place (1992, p 259).
Australia, the land where the national story is that almost everybody is from somewhere else, is for Miller’s protagonists the only place to be: “There’s nowhere better. You’ll be able to imagine it into being for yourself. You’ll be able to make it visible. Think of that! You couldn’t do that with Paris or Berlin or London, could you?” (1992, p 261). The colony is the opposite of any mother country: young and not yet written on, a blank page against the tired and tiresome burden of history and family of Europe (or even China). Australia, the book concludes, is “a divided landscape waiting to be inhabited” by people for whom “exile is the only tolerable condition” (1992, p 302). It is a bittersweet ending: more a brave hope, it seems, than an intimately felt emotion. There is also a touch of envy to it, as voiced by Steven a few pages before when he contemplates Lang and talks about “the possibility that he might really be a peregrinum, a stranger among us, a genuine lang tsze who could return home enlightened, redeemed and reconciled, no matter how long he’d stayed away” (1992, p 296). Again, the words of Elizabeth Jolley resonate here:
Many people in Australia have come from somewhere else. This must, over the years, have influenced the kinds of characters and incidents described by Australian writers. As well as the effects of the sights and sounds of the strange new country there has been the uneasiness of being the stranger, the newcomer. Most people try to overcome feelings of strangeness by making a tremendous effort to belong (Jolley in Lurie 1992, p 136).
The effort made by Miller’s characters appears to consist of finding similarities with other non-belongers, and also of delineating Australia as the country where non- belongers can imagine belonging. The country and its new inhabitants have much in common: invisibility, strangeness, something as yet undetermined. Nevertheless, it is “imagined and dreamed, not an actual place” and this is the problem; it is an Australia of and in the mind, not a comfortable habitual home. Of course there are many other thematic motifs to The Ancestor Game. They are stained glass windows with little miniatures exploring the nature of family and being someone’s child, the nature of friendship, the changing value of language, the role of writing and art, and a first mining of the relationship between story and history. The book is also an important investigation into race and culture, both in Australia and China, and I will come back to that later. For now, I would like to focus 151
on the reception of the novel. I have chosen to divide the many academic and journalistic reviews and analyses of the novel in two: the ones that were written in English by Chinese or Chinese-Australian correspondents and those composed by everybody else. This seems a crude partitioning, but there are notable differences in the ways both book and writer were received by those groups.
Firstly, the academic essays written by non-Chinese (-Australians): out of all of them, there is only one that recognises the link between Miller’s migrant background and the novel. Ursula Antony, writing for the Australian Multicultural Book Review, ends her all-too-brief review by stating that “what appears to make a writer good nowadays is his/her ability to not admit of having inner turmoil which causes him/her to write a book, even though it is blatantly apparent when comparing it with their life stories, as in Alex Miller’s case” (Antony 1995, p 31). Most other critics review the book without looking at the “self at the centre of [the] work”, as Birns calls it (Birns 2010, p 234). For instance, Mette Jorgensen is right, I think, in saying that The Ancestor Game is about the “uncertainty of differences” (Jorgensen 1993, p 19), but to my mind it is imperative to remember that its narrator is a white Anglo migrant who knows himself to be “unrecognised, and therefore unseen” (Miller 1992, p 282): a migrant and yet not a migrant, the same and yet not the same. Enrique Martinez, in the CRNLE (Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English) Reviews Journal, does not recognise Miller’s special position either, but does argue that in writing about the Chinese in the book, Miller has maintained “the individuality of each character”, “not only through the private relationships depicted in the novel but also in their condition as members of a foreign culture”, which “denotes a high degree of understanding, something which is still missing from much of the contemporary scholarly debate on culture and Otherness” (Martinez 1992, p 115). Martinez even contends that “Alex Miller has come to define a method for understanding the Other, requiring of the reader more than the usual span of intellective faculties” (1992, p 115). This understanding, I would argue, is based on the migrant experience Miller has in common with many of his characters. The “more” needed here is a recognition that this experience breeds not just intellectual understanding, but also emotional knowledge. Miller not only knows what he is talking about, he can feel it too. 152
Other reviewers focus on the fact that The Ancestor Game ‘fits’ the literary preoccupations of the times, namely, as Peter Pierce calls it in The Bulletin, a “wave of Australian fiction that confronts Asia”. Here he points to books by “Koch, Grant, D’Alpuget, Drewe, Moffitt and others”, books that have dramatised “the assuagement of guilt of Australia’s role in Vietnam, through characters’ searches for Asian mentors” (Pierce 1992, p 100). Furthermore, he maintains, there are novels like Miller’s, and Brian Castro’s After China, which are concerned with “the difficult understanding of the familiar Chinese stranger within this society”, “rather than the routine propulsion of Australian ingénus into culture shock in miscellaneous Asian settings” (1992, p 101). Most of Miller’s Chinese or Chinese-Australian critics make this difference the focus of their writings. They realise fully that the early 1990s in Australia are a time when Asia has become a literary and political focal point. After the influx of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and those from China after the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989, Euro-Australia is being confronted with Asian voices, and by Australians writing about Asia. As Bruce Bennett asserts in his chapter in the Oxford Literary History of Australia, the first wave consists mainly of what Pierce described as Australians “in culture shock when confronted with Asian settings” (Bennett 1998, p 263). Bennett credits people like C.J. Koch, Robert Drewe and Blanche d’Alpuget with heading the trend: “A recurrent figure in these novels is the journalist who travels to Asian ‘hotspots’ for a story and becomes embroiled emotionally and imaginatively in foreign situations” (1998, p 263). He goes on to say that “the second wave of cultural engagement with Asia is marked by the emergence of a group of first-generation Asian-Australian writers” (1998, p 263), like Yasmine Gooneratne, Kim Don ’o, Arlene Chai, and, of course, Brian Castro. Writers such as Simone Lazaroo and Lilian Ng also start to tell stories about the Asian migrant experience in Australia, dealing with complicated juxtapositions of cultural and personal identity, set against the backdrop of a past that is very different from the present. People like Brian Castro make it their business to ask difficult questions about hybridity, the duality of tradition and modernity, the issue of identity, Othering, and the “spurious dichotomy […] Australia/Asia” (Castro in Bennett 1998, p 263). Castro interrogates Australian, Asian and post-colonial dogmas whenever possible. Some academics do so as well: Bruce Bennett and Dennis Haskell pen White Myths, Heroes and Anti-Heroes: Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region, in which they describe Australian literature as basically just one aspect of 153
what Asian literature has got to offer. In essence, what is happening is that the map of literary and political culture in Australia is changing. Bennett quotes Annette Hamilton: “a combination of fear and desire have characterised Australians’ responses to Asia, and [those] stem from a deep historical ambivalence” (Hamilton in Bennett 1998, p 264). Looking at this problem more closely, and being influenced by Asian- Australian writers’ perspectives, Bennett maintains, will lead to “the habit of crossing cultures, and comparing them” (1998, p 264). China was especially ‘hot’ in the early 1990s. Most Australians writing about China focus on the difference, though, the “distinctions between ‘us’ and them’” (Jose 1992, p 8). Jose describes the description of China in many of those books as “a black hole”, “a bottomless source of amazing and appalling facts”, “the other side of the moon from our everyday reality” (1992, p 8). What surprises Chinese reviewers of The Ancestor Game, is that Miller’s book seems somehow different. Wang Labao, writing about Australian literature available in China, even quotes an unnamed Chinese critic who credits Miller with changing the relationship between the two countries. The novel, this critic declares,
carries a political overtone of Australia seeking cultural ties with its geographical neighbour Asia which it persistently and determinedly shunned previously. It is true that apart from having written a marvellous book, Alex Miller has also, consciously or unconsciously, contributed to Australia’s quest for closer cultural ties with east Asia and revealed a country in transition (Labao 2000, p 127).
Sometimes, as in Zijie Pan’s analysis of ‘The Chinese Man in The Ancestor Game’, Chinese reviewers even get a little annoyed at the way Miller’s different Othering is “confusing the relationship between centre and margin” (Pan 2007, p 100). Especially interesting are the four articles, academic and otherwise, written by one of Miller’s Chinese translators, Ouyang Yu. Apart from being a translator, Ouyang Yu was at the time writing a doctoral thesis on representations of the Chinese in Australian literature at La Trobe. Most of these representations clearly angered him. In 1995, he condenses his research in an article for Tirra Lirra, claming that “the image of the Chinese as the ultimate Other is carried on with some of the old stereotypes still present” (Ouyang 1995-96, p 42): “the basic Orientalist and ethnocentric assumption that China is somehow backward, unprogressive, and unenlightened, remains the same” (1995-96, p 43). After a scathing review of the Australian literary tradition’s representation of 154
China, he states that “the real change does not seem to come until the publication in 1992 of Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game”, which, he says, locates “the Chinese as an inalienable part of Australian history”, and writes in “subversive ways” about “the origins and identity of Australia”. “The image of the Chinese has transcended the mere physical description of racial and cultural particularities to become something so metaphysical, so philosophical, that the Other disappears to give place to the idea of infinite boundary crossings” (1995-96, p 44). It is not even just the Chinese who get this different treatment, Ouyang writes in a later article for Southerly: all “characters are hard to characterise. They appear to be a mixture of races, half-Chinese, half- English, and half-Australian. Boundaries are crossed and re-crossed”: “Thus it goes on until the clear-cut lines are all blurred. Nationality is no longer important” (Ouyang 1996, p 197). What is interesting here, is that although the Chinese (and Chinese- Australian) reviewers see the importance of difference in The Ancestor Game, they are so fixed on Chinese-Australian differences, that they do not pay attention to the other (Anglo) difference the book also flags. Whether or not critics see past the Asian/Australian focus, we can trace its origins to the migrant experience of the author and see how the Anglo migrant writer is able to use his own particular background to go beyond and ask questions about the general (multi)cultural nature of Australia and the position of migrants within it. I would argue that, although circumstances have changed in Australia in the roughly forty-five years that separate The Ancestor Game from Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South, Miller and Park are very similar in this respect. Despite the obvious differences between Lang Tzu and Lick Jimmy, both are outsiders living amongst other, less visible, outsiders. Both also struggle with the same issues; though voiced very differently by their creators, belonging and alienation are at the centre of the preoccupations of these wandering Chinese men. Furthermore, both Miller and Park seem to use their emotional and physical knowledge of the migrant experience to examine diverse groups of migrants and their position within Australia. Lastly, although the critical reception appears very different, multiculturalism has not given Miller any more visibility as a migrant writer than Park enjoyed.
Miller’s next book, The Sitters, focuses on questions about art, literature, story and their roles in understanding one’s divided identity and belonging. In talking about this novel, I have taken the liberty of breaking with the chronological unity I have so 155 far adhered to. Thematically, The Sitters and the later Prochownik’s Dream, are very much alike, and in a way companion pieces. First of all, both protagonists struggle with their migrant heritage. In The Sitters, the narrator is a middle-aged painter, who “left [his] home when [he] was fifteen” (Miller 2003 [1995], p 7), migrating from England to Australia, after a stint “working for a farmer in Somerset, in a village near the edge of Exmoor” (2003 [1995], p 32). In Prochownik’s Dream, the protagonist has not migrated himself, but is deeply troubled by the migrational experiences of his family. As in The Sitters, there is a father who taught his son to paint, leaving him with a wish to “build the temple of my father’s dreams with my art” (Miller 2005, p 50). This complicated interaction between life and art is one of the most important themes in both novels. Miller has his protagonists in both novels contemplate art as “self-portraiture” (2005, p 193), and described Prochownik’s Dream as “let’s face it, […] a book about me” (Miller in Koval 2005, radio-transcript, p 3). Here too, the protagonist, Toni Powlett (or Prochownik), has hit a creative crisis after the death of his father. There is no place in his being for art, because every bit of it has been taken up with the difficult mourning process. It is not until he “places himself within his own art that he at last experiences the full liberating force” (Miller 2005, p 6). Guided by what Toni sees as a random quote from Sartre’s novel Nausea, “I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late” (Miller 2005, p 3 and p 242), he finally understands what has been holding him back. As Miller says on the Allen and Unwin website, Toni
breaks through into an imaginative landscape in which the future of his work is laid out before him. Fiction, as with art, must encompass the legendary, the poetic, and the spiritual truths of the human story if it is to find an authentic place in our lives and in our culture. To liberate our story from its literal dimensions, so that it becomes a landscape of the mind and the imagination, even a landscape of the spirit, is the task of the artist and the writer (Miller 2005, p 8).
It is in his path to self-recovery via incorporating friends and family into his paintings, that the normative contemporary Australian Powlett admits to his migrant roots, resuming his father’s name, while reconciling with his wife and her father, a migrant from Italy. In a lecture called Written in Our Hearts: Thinking about Truth in Fiction and History, Miller states that “no two things are more deeply connected than our stories and our past. […] Without memory, without the past, there are no stories 156
[…]. Memory is the source of all our arts. Without memory we cannot reflect on ourselves and our interior life” (2006, p 2). He goes on: “I see the novel as a kind of unofficial history […]. The story of the intimate and private lives of us” (2006, p 6-7). The only way to write about humanity, is to start with yourself: in trying to understand what is ‘real’ or ‘true’ inside yourself, there is a chance that you can get to “some underlying condition – some would say a truth – of existence” (Miller 1999, p 6). Of course there is something of the idea of the artist as the existentialist traveller in this image, of the quintessential Flying Dutchman, forever doomed to wander the seas. However, in Miller’s case, the specificity here is that this concept is compounded by the fact that this writer is also a real traveller, struggling to find form in a new land and after a physical dislocation. To comprehend this writing, it is therefore imperative to understand this writer: “A work of art is a deeply subjective statement. It may even be a deeply spiritual statement. Someone’s life is in it” (Miller 1993, p 7). Life, in Miller’s case, includes the “truth” of his migration and this is apparent in both novels. Toni Powlett struggles with the question of “how we depict ourselves” (Miller 2005, p 35). He realises that “there [is] no place in art for the literal truth” (2005, p 123), and that “these are drawings. Don’t confuse them with life” (2005, p 136). Nevertheless, Toni suspects from the start that his aim of making something of real value involves saying something about his father, about memory and the past. This makes up the core of “his unofficial history, a kinship history of displacement. A story of losers, not winners, of those who had drifted into the dark without a trace” (2005, p 36). The story of Toni’s father haunts his son, although he only knows the broad strokes of it: how his dad was sent to a labour camp in Poland at the age of 14, how he met Toni’s mother in a refugee camp in England after the war, and how they emigrated to Australia with the same suitcase that now holds his drawings. And how he eventually ended up doing shiftwork on the moulding line at the Dunlop factory, where the foreman changed his name to Powlett, because “Prochownik is not a name in Australia” (Miller 2005, p 244). As was true for the Existentialists quoted in the book, Toni’s father has always believed that the reason for living (and the reason for art, for that matter) was to be found in making “sense of one’s life at the end” (2005, p 48). The perennial question, of course, is how to do that? Toni first tries to simply paint what he sees, a group of colleagues who have offered him the commission of a big group portrait, and with it, somewhere where Toni can belong, be part of. 157
Although he craves this belonging, Toni realises that taking this ‘direct route’ is ultimately a dead end. “His father would not have approved. For his father, art had been to find himself in his subject, to test his own capacity for love, and for that there could be no simplified route, only the endless, assiduous contemplation of a devout” (2005, p 106). The only way to truly belong, is to first belong to yourself, to acknowledge your identity. Given the choice between betraying that identity and the comfort of belonging, the answer is brutal but simple. In the end, Toni realises that suppressing his migrant ‘roots’ in order to belong to mainstream Australia, gets him nowhere. Only when he acknowledges who he is, by painting his family’s past into his work and taking back his family’s name, does he get a chance to ‘fit’.
In the world of Miller’s narrator in The Sitters, the English migrant living in Australia, wholeness does not exist any more either. His migrant experiences have led him to believe that “you’re never going to get the whole picture. There’s a blankness at the heart of each of us. Art is our dispute with that blankness, that mute place. Art is our dispute with reality” (2003 [1995], p 100). Art, for Miller’s narrator, tries to deal with what is no longer there, a mythical belonging that might never have existed in real life, but is now, after migration, a distinct impossibility. “We paint landscapes from our sense of loss and alienation from the real landscape. We paint portraits from our alienation from people. It’s nostalgia for company we don’t have and can’t have. Absence and loss” (2003 [1995], p 110). So art fails in solving the problem. Or if it succeeds, it is not in solving the problem, but in bringing it into consciousness and giving it form. The only thing it may be able to do is to communicate it, although even that is doubtful. Miller’s narrator especially distrusts language here.
There are things that it’s impossible to express with words. Language employed to express emotion is a perversion. […] It’s not words that shape our intuitions. It’s not in what we say but in what we leave unsaid that we reveal the shape of our deepest motives. In the places between the words. In the tacit and the implicit. In the silence beyond words. That’s where we hide our truth. Behind the endless buzzing of language. The sovereignty of silence is its ambiguity. Silence is a power greater than speech. It always begins with a question. An uncertainty. Then we become wanderers in search of ourselves (2003 [1995], p 15-16).
Or, as Miller explained his own authorial search during our interview: “The truth is in the shadows. The sort of truth I look for is an indirect truth. If you look at it too 158
directly, you lose sight of it. There is something in the truth that is always elusive. […] Truth isn’t an object of logic, it is an object of feeling” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June). This is reminiscent of the way Simon Schama describes most Dutch painters’ views on portraiture, as depicting “the likeness of an idea, a sense of a person, rather than the laborious imitation of physiognomic detail”, looking for “the man” not “the likeness” (Schama 2010, p 241). I find it also interesting that although Miller’s first language is English, and therefore not dissimilar to the language used in Australia, his problems with and distrust of language match the issues non-English speaking migrant writers have with words and with their capacity to communicate and to articulate understanding. Apparently, Rushdie’s observation that migrant writers are “translated men” (Rushdie 1992, p 17) seems thus a truism for all writers who have migrated.
In The Sitters, the narrator has to come to terms with his displacement, and the “blindness with regard to my intimates” (Miller 2003 [1995], p 8) that this has resulted in. Toni Powlett, in Prochownik’s Dream, has a second-hand but equally complicated conundrum to come to terms with, trying to not only ‘save’ or ‘resolve’ his own identity, but that of his whole family. The family’s Australianisation – symbolised in their new anglicised name – has only been a superficial ‘solution’. It is a “false identity” (Ibid), merely masking the fact that the father, unable to really fit his new surroundings, has been forced to try to hang onto his ‘true’ self at night. Then he can draw, if only the safety of the small world of his family: his wife’s washing, his children’s toys, his apartment’s kitchen. Reluctant to go back in his mind to picture the past, and afraid to use his imagination, he sticks to visualizing what he sees, knows and loves, a domestic vision, hoping that it will somehow “justify his existence – and even, possibly, give him a certain pleasure in his life” (2005, p 242). Toni remembers his father’s nightmares and the way he, as a young boy, “used to think you forget things in time”. Now, though, he realises that “one life’s not long enough” to do that (2005, p 194). For his older brother Roy, born outside Australia, it is just as bad. There is still “the ethnic scar tissue”, “not erased by the passage of years but subdued”:
Like their mother Lola, Roy had remained a Prochownik at heart and, like her, still carried the indelible marks of the displaced. The name-change to Powlett 159
had not taken with Roy or with their mother. With those two it had been a failed graft. Perhaps one lifetime was not long enough to become an Australian (2005, p 190).
Toni knows that his father was soothed by the fact that his youngest son, by being born in Australia, “belongs to the new world”, that “he felt it made [him] safe” (2005, p 192). However, the son does not feel safe, nor has he gotten close to any belonging. Only when he takes back his family’s name, his family’s and therefore his own, identity, does he finally find some stable(r) ground. Ironically, for Toni’s agent Andy this is commercial gold. Prochownik, as a brand, “has got a touch of the ethnic. Which is a handy flag to have on the mast these days. Prochownik is nobody’s darling. He is terra incognita” (2005, p 234). Finally Toni has a terra, a soil, a place to speak from, however incognita it might be: “He felt that he had at last taken root in his own work, and the possibilities for his art seemed to him to be endless. With the inclusion of himself, he had stepped through a doorway and the field of his future endeavour lay open to him” (2005, p 254). The troubled prodigal son has found his way back home. He has “earned the right to belong to his own world” (2005, p 264). To Miller’s mind there can only be one right route: the hard one. Identity, for the migrant, is finding a position to speak from, however difficult that may be, and telling a personal truth.
Regarding these novels, a few reviewers made a connection, however tentative, between the words and the writer. To start with those is, as in the case of The Ancestor Game, to start with Ursula Antony, who argues that the theme of The Sitters is “once again, the emigration song ‘Where for God’s sake is home?’” (Antony 1996, p 18). Brian Musgrove also saw an association between the writer and his output. He wrote of The Sitters that “As in Miller’s previous novels, the autobiographical element seems thinly veiled – the expatriate painter on the fringe of Canberra university culture strongly resembles Miller” (Musgrove 1996, p 113). He even points to “concerns with time, distance, loss, legacy and identity” (Ibid), before concluding that the novel mostly relates to the problems of language and representation. Most other reviewers see the migrant issues, but not necessarily the connection with Miller the migrant writer. In his review of The Sitters, fellow migrant Andrew Riemer starts by saying that “there is an emptiness” in the narrator’s life, “troubled” as he is “by memories of his early life in England” (Riemer 1995, p 13A). 160
Riemer recognises that Miller has a “preoccupation with the Englishman in exile” (Ibid), but in the end this is as far as his analysis goes. The same is true for his appraisal of Prochownik’s Dream, ten years later. Riemer concedes that “the backbone of Miller’s carefully articulated tale” is “Toni’s journey of return to that name [Prochownik], an acknowledgement of the deepest level of his identity” (Riemer 2005, p 19). However, he then maintains that at the heart of the novel is “the age-old dilemma of the artist: how to reconcile the call of art with the individual’s duty to others” (ibid). Others identify the relationships between art and loss here, although none of them makes a connection to migration or Miller’s background. The general conclusion seems to be that both novels are concerned with “the creative process” and “absences, the unsayable, regret for that which cannot be changed” (Coombs 1995, p 8). There is, though, the understanding that the book is not just about the “nature of art, the responsibility of the artist to the work, […] and the relationship between the artist and those who share his life”, but also deals with “the complex ways the past speaks through us, and the capacity of art – and love – to make that past bearable” (Bradley 2005, p 50). Unfortunately, this insight only applies to Miller’s characters, not to Miller himself.
Two Miller novels that I consider to be companion-pieces as well, are his 2000 Conditions of Faith, and the most recent book, Lovesong (2009). Conditions of Faith was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2001 and won that year’s NSW Premier’s Christina Stead Award, while Lovesong made it to the shortlist of the Miles Franklin Award in 2010. On the face of it, Conditions of Faith tells the story of Emily Stanton, a young Australian living in 1920s Melbourne, who is so enchanted with the idea of exotic far away places that she takes up the first offer that will get her there: a marriage with a Scottish engineer, who is based in Paris. This propels her, as the book’s blurb says, into “a journey of self-questioning and intellectual reawakening”, that will in the end see her give up her newborn child and choose a life of solitary study in Europe. In the book’s infancy, Conditions of Faith was based on journals written by Miller’s mother and left to him when she died. They tell the story of when she, then still a young woman, was working as a governess and maid in Paris in the 1920s, and was “ardently in search of a reason for living” (Miller in Bellamy 2000, p 7). From this point of departure, though, the book turns into a novel where “Emily is more me than my mother. One always writes about oneself in the end” (ibid). 161
Probably because of that, Conditions of Faith too is a story of migrancy. This time the journey goes the other way (that is, it depicts a migration away from Australia), but the questions are the same: who is an insider or an outsider at any given time or place, and what do people do to stay inside those boundaries or stray outside them. The quintessential Miller question, ‘who owns a story’, is explored, and the novel is Miller’s first foray into confrontations between West and East, notably Australia and France on the one hand, and North Africa on the other. This is also where Conditions of Faith is linked most explicitly with Lovesong, which explores the same themes. In Conditions of Faith, everything starts with Emily, whose emotions at leaving sway from “a sense of relief at having made good her escape” (Miller 2000, p 23), to realising that having left, she will always be on the periphery of what others consider normality. In this book Miller tries out various different options of belonging and insidership. A Tunisian friend of Emily’s, who is an outsider in his own country, maintains that the answer is “under your feet” (2000, p 162), meaning the connection to place, the land, the soil. He is a Pied Noir, a French national born in North Africa, a coloniser without being one in the eyes of white, French-born colonisers, and therefore very much an in-between. Another possibility Miller investigates here is belonging to people: lovers, in Emily’s case, or friends, or even a child. This does not work either: Emily feels as though motherhood is taking away the ownership over her own body and life; that she is forced to become somebody she is not, to betray her sense of identity and self. In the end, when her husband goes back to Australia and expects her to go ‘home’ as well, she chooses her own independence and identity over home and family, knowing full well that he will leave her because of that. It is vintage Miller: people having to choose between belonging and selfhood and opting for the latter. “There is a moment in our lives when we must decide which world we belong to. The world of our dreams or the other one. We can’t all drift back and forth between them without risking losing our place in both” (2000, p 330). Other characters in Conditions of Faith are confused about their positioning as well. The Algerian who has lived in Paris for twenty years and is more French than the French, but knows he is “not French enough to be a Frenchman among those who are truly French” (2000, p 51). The Tunisians living in their birth country, but under colonial rule, can not figure out what their true history is any more. There are Americans who do not seem to belong to anything or anywhere, but who own everything nevertheless. The list goes on, an endless litany of confused, dislocated, 162
alienated people grappling with their positioning and fractured identities. The only one who finds resolution to the never-ending questions is the one (Emily) who knows she has to sacrifice one part of herself (the need to belong) to the other (identity). Again, in true Miller-style, she comes to that conclusion through art, a piece of writing in this case, by a Christian saint who was killed by a Roman emperor for holding on to her faith. This diary fascinates Emily and the more she studies it, the more she concludes that writing is essential to living and finding out who you are. “If we do not write it down, we forget everything. We lose it all” (2000, p 27). Not unusually, reviewers again found it difficult to recognise Miller’s pointers to migrant themes. Most of them agreed on the fact that Conditions of Faith explored “the psyche of a woman torn between family and career” (Ferguson 2000, p 22), “the ‘universally’ troublesome question ‘what will make me happy?’” (Hewitt 2001, p 26), or the “dilemma of a woman searching for a purpose” (Fitzgerald 2000, p 80). The only exception I could find that does acknowledge a connection to migrancy issues, was written by Ben Ball for the British Times Literary Supplement. Although he finds the book “a little unseemly”, Ball reads the novel as largely about “displacement”. He even considers Miller’s position within contemporary Australian literature:
Displacement is the dominant theme of much contemporary Australian writing, often valued in a modern multicultural society for creating a multiple, relativist perspective. Alex Miller, on the other hand, explores the loss involved in this fluidity: what is constant enough for us to believe in? His subject is the migrant rather than the refugee (Miller himself left England for Australian at seventeen), a condition haunted by choice. […] Conditions of Faith is as concerned with the individual sacrifices and solipsism that mobility brings as with its insights (ibid).
I find it telling that this review has been written by a non-Australian; even more that its author is British. It is entirely possible that Australian critics are so used to the binaries that determine who is and who is not a migrant in this country, that this obscures their view. To Ball, Miller is evidently a migrant like any other, which makes it easier for him to make the connection between writer and story.
Lovesong comes back to the issues and even the country Miller explored in Conditions of Faith. John Patterner is an Australian who falls in love with Sabiha, a Tunisian woman running a café in Paris that caters mostly for North African migrants working in France. Sabiha desperately wants a child, and promises John that she will 163
migrate to Australia as soon as the child is born and she has been able to show it to her father in Tunisia. Over the years it becomes clear, though, that their wish to become parents will probably never materialise. This starts to taint their relationship and locks them into a stalemate: both their love and their lives have been put on hold waiting for this child to, in a way, set them free. Eventually Sabiha decides to force a pregnancy into being, risking the relationship, but giving both herself and her husband the opportunity to leave. The book’s narrator is an elderly Melburnian writer, Ken, whose life has become empty, but who is greatly reinvigorated by listening to the story a newly remigrated John tells him. As the story unfolds, Ken increasingly feels the need to make it his own, changing and amending it to fit and alleviate his own feelings of displacement in his life. Ken looks a lot like Miller himself. He has a Scottish father and has just finished a book called The Farewell:
I thought this was a pretty direct hint for reviewers and interviewers, who are always on the lookout for metaphor and meaning in what we do. I waited for the first interviewer to ask me, ‘So, is this your last book then?’ I was ready to say, ‘Yes, it is’. Simple as that, and have done with it. But no one asked. They asked instead, ‘Is it autobiographical?’ I quoted Lucian Freud: Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait. The trouble with this was they took Freud’s radiant little metaphor literally (Miller 2009, p 12-13).
What is remarkable is that Miller’s ‘definition’ of a story in Lovesong, as voiced by Ken, is similar to Emily’s view on the value of story-telling in Conditions of Faith. According to Ken, stories are “confessions”: “Aren’t we compelled to tell our stories by our craving for absolution?” (Miller 2009, p 14). Emily’s position is that Perpetua wrote her story to “explain herself. In the hope that someone would read it one day and understand what she’d gone through in that cell and would see why she’d been so stubborn about her beliefs. That’s why people write, isn’t it? So they won’t feel alone? To be understood” (Miller 2000, p 194). “To be understood”, to prevent loneliness, to confess and be granted absolution: to me they are descriptions of the same motivation. It all starts deep within individuals, who feel the need to tell the outside world who and where they are; it is a way of writing yourself into existence, especially when belonging is not a given, but something that has to be earned and proven, as is the case with migrants. 164
Like Conditions of Faith, Lovesong is a novel about migrancy disguised as a love story. Again there are many layers of (non-)belonging and strangeness here, especially in the interaction between John and Sabiha in Paris. It all starts with the location of the café, ‘Chez Dom’, where Sabiha and her aunt work, a place that caters specifically for North African migrants: “strangers did not, as a rule, find their way” there (2009, p 17) – strangers here, of course, meaning locals, the white French. “The men could speak their Tunisian dialect, and the spicy cooking smells in the café were the smells of home” (2009, p 37), the narrator remarks. Paris is Houria (Sabiha’s aunt)’s “city of exile” (2009, p 25), while on the other hand she realises that “el Djem is no longer my home”, and that she is happy to die in Paris, because “this is where my memories are” (2009, p 34-35). Sabiha herself, who especially misses her father, tries to silence her guilt for having left by saying that her father “knew that people go away and never return” (2009, p 44). But this does not alleviate the sadness and the feeling of loss. When Sabiha meets John for the first time, Miller’s narrator introduces him as “the stranger”, somebody who “disrupts everything”, somebody as well who brings an “absence” to where once there was a whole contentment (2009, p 55-59). John loves his wife and their home “in a quite painful way”, even labels it “sacred”, but recognises that “even if he lived in this place for the rest of his life it would never be real. […] It stood away from him, and he was not admitted to it. […] He could feel the deepening of his isolation, his absence, his drifting” (2009, p 84). Thinking about the future and fatherhood, there is only one thing clear to John: “If his children grew up in France they would be strangers to him and to his country, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that” (2009, p 87). As in earlier books and in Conditions of Faith, in Lovesong Miller is again fascinated by and playing with words and language. John and Sabiha speak French together, a second language for both, but they realise that this robs them of the essence, the nuance of their emotions. When John asks Sabiha to translate an Arabic sentence, she tells him that the words’ “meaning is in the Arabic only. It is not in the French. In French these words mean something else. Something less” (2009, p 69). Naming, too, is significant. The patrons of Chez Dom (and sometimes even Sabiha herself) call John “the quiet Australian” (2009, p 130), perhaps a reference to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, another book about an Anglo outsider mixed up in the consequences of a French colonial adventure. John’s rival and the eventual father of Sabiha’s child, is Bruno, who she calls “the big Italian” (Ibid). Sabiha hardly ever 165 calls the men by their given names, as if their identities, their personalities are not important; as if they are interchangeable and only useful because of their child-giving function. Where the men are nameless, the women are very clearly not. Emily, in Conditions of Faith, has a name meaning ‘rival’, or ‘trying to excel’. With Sabiha, Miller takes this idea of power even further. Sabiha was one of the eight adopted children of Ataturk, father of the modern Turkish nation and its supreme commander at Gallipoli. She became the first female combat pilot in the world, and Istanbul’s main airport on the Eastern side is named after her. Significantly, Istanbul too is very much a city in between cultures and continents, and it is interesting to note that Ataturk gave his daughter the last name Gökcen: ‘belonging to the sky’; the only place without borders, the only place without a place, and therefore without an in- between (www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-F/-Ka/G-k-en.Sabiha.html ). Names, of course, are pointers to identity (recall Kabara in The Tivington Nott, for example) and to an essence of what one was before migration. Sabiha makes that very clear, when halfway through the book, she says: “I am Sabiha. […] This is who I am. This is the name my mother and father blessed me with when I was born. I love my name” (2009, p 171-2). For Miller, the point of Lovesong seems to be that belonging and home are mirages, fantasies that do not even need consideration anymore: strangeness and displacement are the only certainties around. I suggest Miller’s main investigation here (as it was in Conditions of Faith), is whether it is possible to find belonging with and in relation to people. Especially from the relationship between John and Sabiha, the impression the novel leaves is that the answer to that question is negative. Although they love each other, when John thinks about “his beautiful wife”, he concludes: “What strangers they really were to each other. Strangers to each other’s language. To each other’s childhood. Strangers to each other’s tribe” (2009, p 192-3). It makes his love “helpless” (Ibid), and creates a distance both of them feel difficult to bridge. Sabiha too uses the word “stranger”, both to describe “her stranger, her husband” (2009, p 231) and “the stranger in the mirror. The enigma of herself” (2009, p 245). In her thinking, though, there is a difference between the possibilities of connection that women have and the options open to men: “Men, she said to herself, are not like women. Their aloneness is in their souls. In their deepest place, men remain solitary all their lives. No matter how well loved they know themselves to be by a woman, men are always on their own” (2009, p 287). One of the possible reasons 166
for this – and I have to admit I find this a troubling issue in both books – is that in Conditions of Faith and Lovesong the men, especially the husbands and their ‘rivals’, are at the mercy of the women in one of the most crucial aspects of their lives. Emily and Sabiha have relationships with men who are not their husbands and who become the (suspected) fathers of their children, either by choice or by ‘accident’. Women here seem to determine not only parentage, but also lineage, family, ancestry, and therefore belonging. Men’s say in their future and the future of their ‘tribe’ appears limited and as unsuccessful as their attempts to connect truly to the women in their lives. This seems important, especially because Miller refers to kin, to tribe, as something that goes straight to the heart. When Sabiha and Nejib, one of the patrons of the café and a fellow Tunisian, make music together, John realises that
this was the place in her heart to which [he] would never be admitted. […] It was not something that could ever be learned. One had to be born with it. To know it in one’s heart as a child, the way he knew the bush and the sounds and smells of his own childhood home. Nothing would ever replace it. And it could never be shared. Except with another born to it (2009, p 310-311).
This connection, therefore, gives ‘access’ to home, which in turn gives ‘access’ to identity: “There must be things about ourselves we can only know properly when we’re at home” (2009, p 325), John tells Sabiha. So it would be possible to conclude that whoever is in ‘control’ of the future of the tribe, is also in command of important issues to do with belonging and identity. In these two novels, this ability seems to be restricted to women, with men dependent on them for connection and self.
Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape of Farewell (2007) also explore tribes and individuals and belonging and identity. The geneses of both books have by now been well documented, mostly because Miller himself has talked and written about them often. Both were ‘born’, at least in their embryonic state, during the time Miller worked at a stock camp in outback Queensland. There he first heard the story about what happened at Cullin-la-Ringo station in 1861, when nineteen white settlers were massacred by local Aborigines. The idea of writing about it “continued to pester [him]” (Miller 2008, Allen and Unwin Reading Group Notes, p 1) for fifty years, until finally he met Dr. Anita Heiss at a conference in Hamburg, 167
Germany. Miller and Heiss talked about the massacre and the “web of connections” (Ibid) between it and Miller’s earlier novel, Journey to the Stone Country,
a story also set in North Queensland, and which dealt with a profound reconciliation of the past that had been effected by two friends of mine, one a Queensland Murri and the other a descendant of one of the white settlers who had dispossessed the Aborigines of their country in the 1860s. These two people were, of course, familiar with the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre, the white woman’s father even having owned for a time a section of the original run on which the massacre took place (ibid).
The Aboriginal leader who heads the assault on the white settlers in Landscape of Farewell, is called Gnapun, as is one of its main protagonists, Dougald Gnapun, his great-grandson, by now an old man. It is a name also proudly carried by one of the minor characters in Journey to the Stony Country, a boy named Arner Gnapun, who keeps listening to “the voice of 2PAC thumping instructions for living to them from their CD player, Kick the shit and make the white man bleed. God bless the dead…” (Miller 2002, p 33). Arner and his sister Trace are the children of a man who used to muster “the scrubs” (2002, p 29) with Bo Rennie, one of the main characters in this book, Miller’s second Miles Franklin Award winner. Bo Rennie, a member of the Jangga people, and Annabelle Beck, a descendant of white settlers of the same area, are based on friends of Miller, and the journey made by the two in the book has its origins in a trip he undertook with his friends, from Townsville to Bowen. Those are the biographical origins of the fiction, after which the writing started. About that process, Miller wrote that “realities got moved around a bit rather than invented – re- invented might be a better word for it” (Miller 2002, Allen and Unwin Reading Group Notes, p 3-4). What Miller has done here has to do with capturing “an underlying cultural truth” (Ibid), which, in this case, is based on his analysis of the differences between Western and Aboriginal culture. On the one hand, according to Miller, there is the European culture, based on “the passion to know, to understand through questioning”, which is, “in the end the passion to possess. […] It is this passion to know and to possess that has driven five hundred years of European colonialism” (Miller 2002, p 43). This is a project where “we ignore our past and drive confidently toward a future in which everything is to be known and everything is to be consumed. We have abandoned our past in favour of a dream of the future” (Miller 2003-2004, p 103). One of the problems here, Miller 168 says, is that as a consequence of this, “we define human existence as something that is in need of a cure, and we retain a deeply ambivalent love-hate tension with the land we occupy” (ibid). Another consequence of this, is an “enormous impoverishment in a “moral and spiritual” sense, which Miller calls the
loss of the sacred. This loss is experienced by growing numbers of people as a deepening divide between themselves and their sense of belonging. It is surely a paradox at the heart of our European culture that each technological advance in the race to possess the future brings with it this sense of failed private experience (2003-2004, p 104).
Miller juxtaposes this emptiness with the fullness of the Aboriginal culture, where possessing does not mean consuming, but cherishing and preserving (ibid). Thus,
the people of such cultures know who they are. It is this certainty of belonging that most strikingly distinguishes them from the European. Their knowledge of self and place is a birthright. They have no need to go in search either of themselves or of some lost golden age. Within the intact traditional cultures of indigenous peoples, everything that is necessary to know is already known (Miller 2003, p 43).
This problem of white non-belonging is at the core of both novels. Through the investigation into the differences and commonalities between the Western and Aboriginal ways of life, Miller explores the migrant themes that have been prevalent in all his writing: insiders and outsiders, wanderers and ‘belongers’, for lack of a better word, and their identity. This originates, I argue, at least partly from a migrant sensibility, a need to constantly question who and where one is, and the recognition that white Australia is based in this same questioning. It also stems from a feeling of uncertainty that is not just theoretical, but has the experience of displacement at its core. Therefore it should come as no surprise that both novels begin and end with the question of ancestry. Journey to the Stone Country tells the story of a physical journey, undertaken by two people, who have very different ways of belonging to the land they were born onto. Bo Rennie has never lost his connection to the Urannah Valley (fictionalised as the Ranna Valley), while Annabelle Beck struggles to regain her ‘place’. To Bo Rennie, ancestry does not mean only people and past, but the land as well. He feels deep connections with every stone and scrub and knows he belongs to the soil as much as the soil belongs to him. In contrast, Annabelle Beck, blocked by 169 a complicated amalgam of academic education, ancestral guilt and lack of – emotional – knowledge of her family, has to start at the beginning. She is “surprised and impressed by the way her parents”’ old house “enfolds her with a feeling of being her own special place. A real haven. Her sense there at once of being effortlessly at home” (Miller 2002, p 158). It is as if this idea that there is a relationship between herself and her ancestry is a new concept for her, something that, through the course of the book, changes her notion of herself, of her identity. For the first time she realises that there is “a sense of things being linked, and of these links reaching back in time, perhaps even to her own origins. There was something precious about these seemingly insignificant connections. If you lost too many of them, surely you lost your sense of who you were. You lost your culture” (2002, p 179). To Miller, it is exactly this difference between Bo and Annabelle that signals the distinction between their cultures: “the European dreaming discarding the past and struggling to possess the future, the indigenous dreaming the struggle of remaining morally true to the ongoing ancestral project” (Miller 2003-2004, p 104). This ancestral project is also at the core of Landscape of Farewell, a novel shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2008. The book also won that year’s prize for best foreign book, awarded by the Chinese Association of Foreign Literature. The book’s protagonists, Dougald Gnapun and Max Otto, are both deeply troubled by their ancestry. Otto is a German professor of history, who, like most Germans of his generation, is obsessed with the “subject of massacre” (Miller 2007, p 12). Otto says he has not been able to “make any headway with it owing to my emotional inhibitions, not least of which was a paralysing sense of guilt-by-association with the crimes of my father’s generation” (ibid). This is not a theoretical abstraction, as it never is with Miller. Max Otto, was, like his creator, born in 1936, and his “early years were fashioned by the war” (2007, p 39). His father, he suspects, has done things during the war, so unspeakable that both father and son never found a way to communicate: “We all kept our silence. We children were crippled by it and lost our voices to it” (2007, p 227). Otto has always wanted to “write [the] fiction of his life” (2007, p 228), but has never been able to. Dougald Gnapun has a similar problem. His father, deprived of having “received from the Old People the benefits of the passage to manhood when he was a boy” (2007, p 163), violently mourns the “loss of the old ways, and of the respect we once enjoyed” (2007, p 158). What Dougald mostly remembers of his childhood are fierce beatings, and his own determination “not [to] 170
run away” (2007, p 160), because he knew his father was “a lost man” (2007, p 161) and he, as the eldest son, had a responsibility to protect him. Furthermore, Dougald has to come to terms with conflicting emotions of pride and guilt in regard to his great-grandfather, the warrior Gnapun, the Aboriginal leader who killed the nineteen white settlers. It is this personal ancestry and the resulting friendship that leads the men into an exploration of history: their individual ones, their cultural ones, and “the grand project of history, of its discontents, and of the necessity for each generation to rewrite it for themselves” (2007, p 13). Both men realise that every human being has a responsibility, as Miller wrote in an essay for The Bulletin, to
see that we are […] embedded within the story of our own past, the story of our ancestors, the story of our old people, and that there is an ongoing moral obligation for us in this sacred association that will eventually make the land our own. An association that has something to do with our worth as human beings (2003-2004, p 104).
In Landscape of Farewell, Max Otto also views engaging in the project of history as something that is written into the “code” of what it means to be human:
We may not ourselves have participated directly in massacring our fellow humans – and surely no sane person will hold the children responsible for the murders committed by their fathers – but our troubling sense that we are guilty-by-association with their crimes is surely justified by our knowledge that we are ourselves members of the same murdering species as they. I am a human being first and only second, and by the chance of birth, am I the son of my father and mother. I know myself to be implicated in the guilt of both my species and my parents, for it is to these categories of being, and to these only, that I owe a sense of membership (Miller 2007, p 21).
Otto is troubled by his silence, his inability to address the issues of ancestry and history. He realises that he has to confront the past, because “I’ve felt all my life that I’ve had to apologise for my existence. I’ve always known myself to have been on the wrong side” (2007, p 45), and that feeling has become unbearable. Encouraged and almost bullied into looking his responsibilities in the face by Vita, a young Aboriginal academic he views as “the new commander-in-chief of the expedition against the old order” (2007, p 17), he knows that she is right in saying that “It’s not a sin to have regrets […]. It’s only a sin to deny having them so we don’t have to do anything about them” (2007, p 49). Thus Otto sets out to “pay [his] debts” and “face up to the truth” 171
(2007, p 55-56). He has to “ask [his] questions before it is too late” (2007, p 57) and, in doing so, alleviate the feelings of emptiness and nothingness (2007, p 56), because “to suffer from one’s past is a punishment without remedy. It is the end of belief” (2007, p 190). Otto’s search is mirrored by the one undertaken by Gnapun, which, in turn is the continuation of the journey Bo Rennie and Annabelle Beck undertook in Journey to the Stone Country. In (re-)searching their past, they are also confronted with how different the same history can look, viewed from different perspectives and positions. What role do memories play, they each have to wonder, and where do memories turn into “the unreliable inventions of nostalgia” (Miller 2002, p 282)? And, while they are on a secondary quest to map out the landscape and its “sediment of lost histories” (2002, p 38), what does that actually mean? Miller writes that in conserving the past, they
banish their ghosts and make them safe for the future. We falsify them. Conserved things become part of our present. They become ordinary. The very thing we set out to conserve is the thing we inevitably destroy. We keep the fabric but we lose the spirit. It’s one thing to record the past, but it’s something else to conserve it’ (2002, p 204).
Looking at ancestry, history and past, Miller seems to start at the source of all his other migrant preoccupations: landscape and place, home and belonging, identity and self, story and language. In both books, he examines these themes. First there is the landscape. In thinking about it as a person, Miller does three things. To begin with, he portrays the landscape as an active participant, something that interacts with the people: that is in a dialogue, talking back. It acts as Bo’s “heartland” (2002, p 268), and the place that forces Annabelle to think about her relationship with both the landscape and her past. “You go back over old country, and these things come around and find you” (2002, p 308). This ‘active landscape’ also shows the people that the landscape is a separate entity, something that exists whether they are there or not. White settlers, old and new, have come to realise that although they can try to own and tame the land, the landscape will, in time, take control again. In the novel, homesteads crumble, the scrub takes possession, and eventually “the land will be unchanged when you are gone again” (2002, p 258). It is and it will remain “a mystical landscape of dreams and visions, fluid and irreducible, repeated upon itself infinitely, the problem of storage and retrieval overcome” (2002, p 184). The third statement Miller seems to be making here, is that landscape is, especially in Australia, 172
perhaps more an idea than an actual place. For Europeans, the Ranna Valley is either “our idea of an untouched Eden” (Miller 2002, Allen and Unwin Reading Group Notes, p 4), or “undifferentiated and monotonous, not picturesque” (Miller 2004, p 4). In talking about his own trip with ‘Bo’, Miller states that it needed ‘Bo’s “quiet observations” to “gradually [bring] the bush into being around me” (ibid). For Bo this is not the “outback”, but his “homeland” (Ibid), the outback being a quintessential European concept that has no meaning for somebody who lives there and is part of it. The same happens to Max Otto in Landscape of Farewell. In the beginning, the landscape looks “boundless, like the sea, vast and grey and inhospitable, and not a place where human beings were meant to spend their days” (Miller 2007, p 85), a “strangely pointless place” (2007, p 88). Otto too needs the eyes of the people who belong there to understand it and to find himself a place inside it. In this book, though, this connection to landscape is far more problematic than in Journey to the Stone Country. For both Otto and Gnapun land signifies a belonging that is also “a bondage” (2007, p 89), something that makes “a call on [you] and anchors you” (2007, p 89). Otto vividly remembers his uncle, to whom the soil was “an indissoluble aspect of his innermost sense of who he was; that source from whence he had his origins. ‘It is the soil of our fathers’. […] ‘This soil is us!’ He shouted, and he shook me. ‘We are this soil!’” (2007, p 97). This possessive relationship with land is something that scares Otto, something that sounds and smells too much like Hitler and ‘blut und boden’: the “fatherland” (2007, p 99) that has to be protected against invaders. For Gnapun it is even more difficult. Gnapun, who is forced to live in a part of the country that is outside the boundaries of his mob, is an outsider as well. The balance has to be restored, the connection between land and people brought back, something atoned for. The warrior Gnapun does this by killing, his great-grandson by telling the story of the killing to an outsider, thus making it real. Only then can he afford to go back to the “place he had dreamed of all his life, that idealised place of his imagination” (2007, p 218). The issues Miller raises in these two books are complex ones. First, there is the idea of the difference between white and Aboriginal belonging. Although there is a fifty-year gap between Miller’s novels and those of Ruth Park – and multiculturalism has replaced White Australia principles in the meantime – the concepts presented are very similar. Aboriginals, even troubled ones like Gnapun, are presented by both writers as possessing a kind of belonging, to Australia and to 173 themselves, that white people can never obtain. “It’s real Australian and no matter how bad that is, there’s none better”, Park’s character Hughie says (Park 1948, p 205) about his Aboriginal son-in-law. Park juxtaposes this with white migrant non- belonging and positions ‘indigeneity’ as the only way to be truly at home. Miller does something similar: Annabelle in Journey to the Stone Country, and Otto in Landscape of Farewell are unable to solve their ancestral and belonging issues without the help of Bo and Gnapun respectively. They literally need ‘indigenous’ eyes to see where they are and to make sense of their surroundings; without this their personal and group history and identity is a conundrum they cannot solve. White people need Aboriginal people to teach them the importance of the past and the fact that you need first to come to terms with who you were then before you can gain some belonging in the future. Of course white Australian writers have been locating Aboriginals as moral guides before, but I suspect that Park and Miller have different, more personal reasons to do so. There might be a sliding scale of belonging, with Aboriginals – as cliché – on one extreme and migrants on the other. When belonging and displacement are part of a migrant fascination, which is true for both writers, it seems logical that an investigation into this theme will end up with a comparison to a group that, from the outside at least, appears to be most at home. I would also suggest that multiculturalism has not solved the non-belonging of the white migrant in particular. If anything, as noted above, it has made white migrants even less visible today than in Park’s time. Therefore, it is understandable that both Park and Miller still feel the need to explore this issue.
In Journey to the Stone Country, Annabelle Beck asks herself the same question over and over again: what is she coming back to, if this is where she belongs, and is coming back even possible? She knows that “if someone had told me I could never come back I think I would have been heartbroken” (Miller 2002, p 52), but is also well aware that “you should never go back” (2002, p 78). “It should be the easiest thing, shouldn’t it, coming home?” (2002, p 284), she ponders, but knows it is not. Home is hard to locate, and if you choose belonging, what does that do to your (old) identity? Even worse, voyaging and returning ‘home’ seems to alter nothing, because people basically remain the same their whole lives. So this is familiar Miller territory: home, exile, belonging, insiders and outsiders, identity. In Landscape of Farewell, Max Otto has to admit to himself that nothing has really changed, 174
inside, I mean. Nothing real. Nothing real has changed inside. All that is real has endured. Hopes, lusts, desires, dreams. All such stupidities as these have endured, even if I do not have the occasion to speak of them. And fear too. That also. It is all still with me. The strangeness of it all. The strangeness has endured (Miller 2007, p 95).
So although Miller’s writing speaks into a public arena about politically charged issues of migrancy and belonging, paradoxically its message is that this it not where such issues can be resolved:
We may make strangers welcome and even love them and take them into our homes and into our hearts, but that does not make them belong. To belong is something else. Belonging, home, the meaning of such things is not be settled through argument and the presentation of evidence, or even facts. Such things are enigmas and their truth is not rational but is poetic, their uncertainties not resolvable into facts and proofs. Indeed the less that is decided about such things in public life the better it will be for all of us (2007, p 42).
The only thing left to do, the poetic thing, is to “write yourself into existence”, as Emily in Conditions of Faith said. Telling the story might dig up something that cannot otherwise be known or communicated, something that Emily and Toni Powlett call “truth”. The question is whose story it is, who has the right to tell it, and how? In Landscape of Farewell, these are queries at the forefront of Max Otto’s mind. It is the same dilemma Miller himself wrestled with when Max Blatt told him the story that became ‘Comrade Pawel’: how can you make something ring true, as it were, if it is not your story you are telling? Does it have to become your story before you can do it justice? Otto feels burdened by Gnapun’s request, realising that the story has not been told to him, but placed in his care, that it is as if Gnapun has given “his only child into my trust. It was a responsibility for which I felt myself to be unfitted. […] I am only a journeyman historian. I think you need a poet for this” (2007, 167). Soon he comes to the conclusion that it is
not possible to keep [myself] entirely out of it […] the spirit of my own story merged in my imagination and became one. […] It was only when I at last conceived the story in these terms that were intimate to myself that I was able to compose a version of it that at all pleased me. […] His reading would have to give me the answer. Nothing else could (2007, p 169-170).
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Here there is the issue of language again and Miller makes it clear that the intimacy of the writing makes it almost impossible to communicate a private story to the bigger world. This is reminiscent of the laments of other migrant writers, particularly non- English speaking ones, who claim that telling the story of their migrant experience in ‘migrant language’ is likely to be misread by a non-migrant audience. The extra problem here, of course, is that they are reliant on this audience to be able to communicate meaning and intention. In Miller’s description of the process, writing and finishing a story is not a resolution, but almost an emptiness: “By finishing I had not gained something but had lost something, and I did not know how I might remedy the loss, or fill the gap it left in me,” Otto says (2007, p 209). What the writing has given him, he knows, is a “liberty to invoke the dilemmas inscribed in my own heart, inscribed there during my childhood, and which had haunted me ever since” (2007, p 216). Something is opening up, even to the point of healing: “To write of my father’s war, to venture into the darkness of my family’s silence, no longer seemed to me to be utterly taboo and an impossibility” (2007, p 275). The only question now relates to a choice of format and language: “Perhaps some things cannot be, and should not be, written as fiction. […] Perhaps fiction dissolves the pain too readily, and too readily enables us to accept and to absolve ourselves. Acceptance is surely an early stage of forgetting. […] Perhaps only history can preserve it” (2007, p 228). As usual, Miller’s book ends with a rhetorical question, although there is the beginning of an answer. Whatever choice you make, “it is all fragments, and in the midst of it we may know this sense of completion” (2007, p 275). It is like coming back to The Sitters: the only thing left to do is wrestle fragments of ‘truth’ from the silence and hope that together they will paint the picture one quests after: the self-portrait that goes beyond that and tells a broader story of humanity, even if that story is one of killing or exile and the haunting that follows from it.
It is interesting to note that in many of the reviews of Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, Alex Miller is praised for even daring to address the differences between white and Aboriginal Australia. Peter Pierce, writing in the Australian Book Review, asserts that Miller “accepts the challenge to write of Aboriginal people. It is thirty years since Thomas Keneally did so in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Since then, Keneally has reflected that he must have been ‘a 176 fucking madman’ to undertake such a venture” (Pierce 2002, p 48). Andrew Riemer flags that Miller has entered into “a field littered with ideological traps and pitfalls” (Riemer 2002, p 8), while Andrea Stretton declares that: “As a whitefella writing about black and white history in this country, Alex Miller often goes where angels dare not tread” (Stretton 2002, p 12), and compliments the writer on “his footsteps – softly, deftly, steadily”, that “take you places you may not have been” (ibid). Miller’s ‘defence’ here is that he is not writing about white or black people, but about people who “are my friends” (Miller 2009, comment on proof interview). Anita Heiss’ active endorsement of Landscape of Farewell ‘authorises’ Miller’s work as a communal project instead of the work of a white writer. This protects Miller from the kind of criticism that is aimed at people like John Mateer, as we shall see in the next chapter.
I want to return to Salman Rushdie’s reasoning that migrant writers “straddle two cultures” (Rushdie 1992, p 15), and it is from that position that they look at the world. Drawing on personal experience, they know how fragile and fraught matters like home, history and belonging are: that there are varying degrees of belonging and unbelonging and that there is, as Brian Castro noted, a need to “question one’s attachment to place” (Castro 2004-5, p 39). If we acknowledge Miller’s position as a migrant and do not locate him as unproblematically ‘Australian’, we can see how his thematics of estrangement make sense and perhaps how his work might productively be used to reconfigure some of the debates about ‘migrant writing’ within the Australian literary canon. During our interview, Alex Miller was absolutely clear about where his writing comes from: “I’m aware that I don’t belong to any community in the world in any final, deep, provable, reliable way. Mine is a perpetual outsidership, and that is where the energy in the writing comes from” (Miller 2008, interview, 6 June). As he put it, Miller realised that he
can never be a fairdinkum Australian. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in England. By then you are formed, and what you bring with you is your cultural hoard. I can pose as an Australian, I have even recently told a footy joke in a footy pub, but I had to rehearse for it. Sure, after fifty years of living here I am Australian. But I am also, still, an outsider, an onlooker, and that is what I write about (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June).
Talking about the reviews of his novels, both from professionals and normal readers, Miller admits that “it would be terrific” if people could acknowledge the migrant 177 themes in the work. However, “People don’t usually see what I write about. I had come to the point that I thought: I am the only one who sees it” (Miller 2008, interview, 6 June). To him it is obvious that “this writing is about migrancy, there is no getting around that. Even if you don’t want to see it, it is still there” (Miller 2008, interview, 5 June).
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CHAPTER 7
JOHN MATEER: LOST FOR WORDS
In 2003, South African-Australian poet John Mateer and Indigenous Australian writer Kim Scott met at the Fremantle Arts Centre for a public reading. Mateer’s contribution to the evening was his poetry-cycle ‘In the Presence of a Severed Head’, in which he addresses Yagan, a Noongar warrior who was killed in 1833, after which his head was cut off, smoked in a tree stump and taken to England to be exhibited. Scott, according to Mateer, was “visibly agitated” (Mateer 2008, unpublished lecture) after listening to the reading and “explained that he felt there should be a moratorium on non-Aboriginal people writing on blackfella culture” (ibid). In his 2005 book Kayang and Me, Scott himself wrote about the incident, calling Mateer “a stranger” and “a recent arrival” (Scott 2005, p 230-231), who had no right to address Scott’s Noongar heritage. After the event in Fremantle, Mateer wrote a poem about Scott’s reaction, called ‘The Novelist’s Comments’:
After I read my poem addressed to one of his people’s heroes, in his reclaimed, autochthonous voice the novelist doesn’t say This is our language, our land. Nor does he say: Why don’t you go back where you came from?
And in what he doesn’t say he is echoing the woman who after burying her father – a rare fluent speaker of language – declared she should have chucked his tapes and journals, his repository of the tongue, after him into the mouth of the grave:
So that the white bastards wouldn’t get that too (Mateer 2005, p 25).
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The episode, in Mateer’s mind, solidified his outsider-status. He felt he was treated not simply as a (white) writer accused of trespassing, but as “an un-Australian” (Mateer 2008, unpublished lecture). I will elaborate on the details of Mateer’s alleged trespass later in the chapter, but for the moment I would just like to propose that, as is the case with Ruth Park and Alex Miller, the critical position of John Mateer’s work in Australian literary circles and academia is complicated – most of all by his migrant status. On the one hand Mateer is, more than Park and Miller, recognised as a migrant author, someone from elsewhere, who has a migrant story to tell. Most reviewers refer to his country of birth as well as acknowledging, albeit tentatively, that this migrant position and the content of the writing are somehow connected. Added to that, the fact that Mateer is white, English-speaking and South African (and especially the meshing of the three factors) poses a problem. As a consequence of the Apartheid-era, white South Africans are viewed with suspicion both in their own country and across the social spectrum in Australia. Australia’s long involvement in anti-apartheid activities in the 1970s and 1980s has meant that white South Africans are viewed with some cynicism in Australia. They are not usually placed in the largely invisible group that includes people like Alex Miller and Ruth Park. However, they do not fall under the ‘typical’ Australian migrant classification either (see chapter 2), nor are they regarded as Australian writers per se. Even though many of them left their country because they felt they were forced out, the fact that they are collectively seen as having been on the wrong side of the political divide, denies them unproblematic acceptance into the migrant category that usually implies ‘grateful sufferer’ status. According to the Australian definition, it seems unlikely membership of the dominant group in your birth-country, as was the case with white South Africans, will allow for the label of ‘migrant’, a term whose meaning refers to being part of the periphery or non-core, as discussed above. In multicultural Australia, emphasis on visible, ‘ethnic’ difference, constitutes writers like Mateer (and for that matter, other South African-Australian writers as diverse as Courtenay, Coetzee, Kellas and Croggon) as unsettling reminders of the complexity of multiculturalism. Indeed, given their background, it is hard for them – whatever their politics – not to see race and ethnic issues at work in their new country of residence. Monitoring these, as John Mateer often does, can be taken as unwarranted provocation by an unqualified alien. In some ways it is tempting to see in the response in Australia to writers such as 180
Mateer as a manifestation of a deeper anxiety that belies the fear that South Afica made explicit conditions not dissimilar to those in Australia (cf Lake and Reynolds, 2009). Furthermore, Mateer’s work displays recurring themes that are closely tied to migrant preoccupations. I would propose that his particular in-betweenness, based on the combination of colour, language and country, has led to a fundamental conundrum for both writer and critic. It seems difficult to determine where John Mateer fits, according to himself and others, and to establish a position for him to speak from. Questions that come to mind in the case of Mateer and his work are: What shape does his particular (in)visibility take, and what are its limits? Does this (in)visibility only disable, or can also be seen to protect him and his work? Also, is it is possible to compare Mateer to other white, English-speaking migrant writers like Park and Miller and place him in the same category?
Starting to understand Mateer’s work is hard without first looking at his personal background. Although a biographical reading of texts can be reductive, as I have argued before, almost all of Mateer’s writing struggles with and originates in a dilemma of positionality that is inextricable from his white South African past. In the poetry-magazine Five Bells, Mateer himself actually suggests the following:
When I read my poems and talk about my poems I usually have the problem of knowing where to begin. Unfortunately, as much as I don’t like it, a biographic approach is quite effective; biography is where we talk about the auditory, historical, social and linguistic environment we are from, all of which are related (Mateer 2003, p 23).
This view echoes Simon Schama’s insistence that it is impossible to assess a painter like Rubens without “[wondering] whether the bristling cavalry that appears incongruously behind the classical figures [owes] something to Rubens’s [personal] reponse to contemporary history”, for example. Incorporating the painter’s background, according to Schama, leads to a deeper understanding, in this case the inescapable conclusion that “the intense fervour of Rubens’s religious painting is not just art, but spiritual weaponry” (Schama 2010, p 249-250). So that is where I will start, also following Mateer’s premise that the poet is “a namer-of-things”, and that it should “be his Self that is named first” (Mateer 1998, p 1). John Mateer was born in 1971, in Roodepoort, now a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. After the student uprisings in Soweto in 1976, when the young Mateer 181
was five years old, the family decided to migrate to Canada, where they stayed for almost two years. When the feared civil war in South Africa did not materialise, Mateer’s father moved his family back to his birth country. Every time the situation in South Africa worsened, another migration was considered, leaving the boy with a constant “feeling of impermanence” (Mateer 2008, interview, 6 June). Eventually the permanent relocation came in 1989, when Mateer was served with his conscription papers in the midst of one of the worst episodes of what the South African government called the State of Emergency. The country of choice this time was Australia, and the Mateers arrived with many other South Africans. “From 1986 until 1990 some 12.000 South African WICs migrated to Australia to escape the civil war” (Louw and Mersham 2001, p 313), WIC being used here as a term to describe “white, coloured and Indian” South Africans (2001, p 304). For this particular white, English-speaking South African, Australia was a confusing country. Mateer told Michael Heald in 2001:
When we left, [South Africa] was in a state of undeclared civil war: the African townships were frequently on fire, troops were being sent in to ‘restore order’, there were mass rallies and boycotts, and there was a very strict censorship of the media. Shortly after we arrived in Australia, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the so-called ‘thaw’ began. But even during that period there were bombings and the threat of radical Afrikaner nationalists. So, even while trying to live a ‘new life’ in Australia, I felt beset by traumatic events taking place in South Africa. It took me a long time to become used to the experience of being here. And quite often I feel that I’m yet to become used to it (Heald 2001, p 1).
Mateer felt lost and isolated in Australia, and literally stopped talking. Referring to this period in 2008, he called it the “migrant part of the story”. Australians, he said,
are not interested in your background [as a migrant], your story, your history, your experiences. Come and play sport and don’t talk about those things. You are in Australia now, everything is fine. So for me it was impossible to find points of reference to talk about the past. Nobody wanted to know. I did feel that they judged me, though. I was white and from South Africa, so I must be one of the evil-doers. That made it even more difficult to talk or find a connection (Mateer 2008, interview, 8 June).
Of course Mateer was not alone in this reaction. Many migrant (writers), white or non-white, English-speaking or NESB, have struggled to fit into Australia. Mateer’s point here, though, is that it was specifically the combination of being white and 182
South African (and the political connotation attached to that) that complicated his particular migrant position. Also, because of his personal history of being “in a constant state of migration” – the family moved between South Africa and other countries multiple times –, Mateer felt he “couldn’t claim [he] was South African”, but there was no sense of belonging to Australia either. Furthermore, although the two countries spoke English and English was his first language, he struggled to understand the Australian version. “The significance of landscape for Australians, the logic of their language-use, its ironies, to me seemed ridiculous. […] I didn’t feel able to say anything” (2008, 8 June). For a while Mateer tried to translate his confusion through art, specifically painting, studying Fine Arts and Literature at the University of Western Australia. Then the need to speak became too great, resulting in the publication of his first poetry collection in 1994, Burning Swans. The writing, in Mateer’s own words, was “a glimpse of iconoclasm, a moment through which an antipodean symbol burns with the light of an individual’s past and an adopted country’s ahistorical present. The disturbance in the poems is a recognition of loss” (Mateer 1994, blurb). Burning Swans was followed by Anachronism (1997), Barefoot Speech (2000, winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry), Loanwords (2002, shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards), Semar’s Cave (2004, the result of a stint as writer-in-residence at the Australia Centre in Medan, Indonesia), and The Ancient Capital of Images (2005, after another writer-in-residence experience, this time in Kyoto, Japan). In 2007, two books were published, one in South Africa, Southern Barbarians, and one in the UK, Elsewhere, a re-categorisation and sometimes re- writing of earlier work. Apart from this, Mateer wrote several chapbooks and a steady stream of art criticism and essays. In 2001, he was awarded the Centenary Medal for Contributions to Australian Literature and Society. As is the case with Ruth Park and Alex Miller, the conclusion can be drawn that John Mateer has a definite place within the Australian literary core. The question, on the basis of the content of his writing and his position as a migrant writer, is again: does he belong there?
The fairly recent history of South African migration to Australia is an interesting one because Mateer’s work and its positioning can partially be explained by placing him within his ‘group history’. According to James Jupp, by 1921 “there were 5408 South African settlers in Australia” (Jupp 2001, p 688). Most of them were 183
white and of English descent. Eric Louw and Gary Mersham, reporting on one of the very few bodies of research done on South African migration to Australia, determine five distinct ‘waves’. The first one materialised after the 1948 elections “produced an unexpected victory for Afrikaner nationalism” (Louw/Mersham 2001, p 308). The subsequent “challenge to British hegemony over South Africa” and the implementation of the “first stages of apartheid” (2001, p 309), “was deeply traumatic for white Anglo South Africans who came to see 1948 as the year they ‘lost power’” (Ibid). Around 2000 white Anglo South Africans “settled in Australia during the 1950s” (Ibid) and this number grew to around 8000 (Ibid) after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when South African police opened fire on black protesters, killing 69 and injuring over 180 people. The result was black protests, a state of emergency and the banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress. The threat of violence, coupled with the fact that South Africa proclaimed itself a republic a year later and left the Commonwealth, encouraged more whites to leave the country. The second wave “began with the 1976 Soweto revolt” (ibid), that brought 17.000 Anglo settlers to Australia and resulted in the fact that by the 1986 census, there were 37.000 South African-born Australians (2001, p 311). Fears of a civil war and a “black-ruled” South Africa were at the core of most of the decisions to migrate. Within South Africa, the researchers claim, there was “much hostility to migrants who were seen as taking the easy option of migrating (disparagingly referred to as ‘the chicken run’)” (ibid). The pejorative term for this cohort of migrants, liberal white Anglos “with no loyalty to South Africa” (ibid) became PFP’s (Packed for Perthers), a pun on the acronym for the Progressive Federal Party (PFP), led by the charismatic politician Helen Suzman and associated with English-speaking white South Africans. It was not the first time that liberal white, English-speaking South Africans were spoken of with less than respect. A derogatory term for English-speaking South Africans, used by speakers of Afrikaans, is ‘soutpiel’, where the metaphor is someone who has one foot in Britain, one in Africa and his penis (piel) in the sea. This points to the in-between position that this group has always had, or was supposed to have: neither belonging to Africa, nor to Britain. Where the third wave of migration from southern Africa consisted mainly of Rhodesians, the fourth one, the one that brought the Mateers to Australia, started with another state of emergency, in 1985, that intensified the civil war and found many white males conscripted into an army that acted as a de facto police force (2001, p 184
312). Although there was a brief period of optimism in the early 1990s, with the release of Nelson Mandela from jail and then President De Klerk starting negotiations to end the civil war, Louw and Mersham point to an increasing “black nationalist rhetoric”, from the ANC especially, as a reason for many white South Africans contemplating migration. By 1996 there were 55.753 South Africans in Australia (Jupp 2001, p 689), predominantly white and English-speaking (90%) (ibid). The most recent 2006 census makes mention of 104.128 South African-born Australians, the tenth largest group of “migrants” in the country (ABS 2009). Apart from identifying crime as a key motivation to leave South Africa, Louw and Mersham suggest that race and colour, and especially the feeling that South Africa is in a process of “racial re-ranking” (Louw/Mersham 2001, p 315), are important as well. With the ANC starting to “undo the former ‘racial hierarchy”’ (Ibid), whites reported that they felt “‘discriminated against’ in the new South Africa” (Ibid). Ethnographic studies in Australia reveal that there is a belief amongst white South African migrants “that they had become an ‘unwelcome minority”’: “there was a growing sense of marginalization and second-classness. As one white migrant said: ‘There is a sense of being ignored, as though we didn’t matter. Hostility I can maybe take, irrelevance I can’t handle’” (2001, p 321). Louw and Mersham conclude that these migrants carry with them “a sense of ‘displacement’ and ‘loss’ which translates into the sort of ‘collective identity’ characteristics of diasporic populations” (2001, p 322). They quote Clifford, who described diasporas as “‘dispersed networks of peoples who share common historical experiences of dispossession, displacement, adaptation, and so forth”’ (ibid). In short, I would say there are three contradictions in the position of white, English-speaking South African migrants in Australia: first that they are here both voluntarily and forced, secondly that they are both privileged and ‘victims’, and lastly that they are both fellow colonials and foreigners. These issues, and the confusion that flows from them, can be found throughout the work of John Mateer.
In a 1997 article for Australian Studies, Sarah Nuttall, currently professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, made a comparison between South African and Australian literature, focussing on themes of nationalism and identity. Multiculturalism, she states, has made thinking about and defining post-colonialism 185
and post-modernism, both theoretically and practically, imperative. Nuttall says that literature in particular “shares some of the concerns which underlie the Truth and Reconciliation Commission […] as to how to invest a commitment to the future by representing the meaning of the past” (Nuttall 1997, p 61). In talking about different South African writers, Nuttall points to “a new sense of fracture and dissonance”, and says there is a feeling of “the strangeness of history, its otherness, changeability, ungraspability” (1997, p 62) in the work of some writers, while others are concerned with “breaking free from the past” (ibid). With “the old narrative quite literally gone” (ibid), everything has become more or less provisional. In her comparison, Nuttall maintains that while South Africa is preoccupied with “History and with inheritance”, Australia’s concern is “with romanticism and renewal” (ibid). In this country, the past is reconstructed to address the present (1997, p 63). The aesthetic of romanticism is used, says Nuttall, quoting Amanda Nettlebeck, “‘to lay to rest a colonial history of violence and exclusion; to move beyond a culture of division and to gesture towards tolerance and reconciliation’” (ibid). It is a form of “idealism” that, contrary to the new forms in South African literature, works “within a language often compromised by its inherited colonial codes of reference” (ibid). In both white and Aboriginal literature, authors use nature and landscape especially, and a “deeper consolation is to be found in tradition – an older history” (1997, p 64). In Australian writing there is, Nuttall says, “a resistance to disturbance through question and contestation”, and “an impetus towards […] wholeness in response to historical and social fracture” (ibid). In an earlier text (the introduction to Text, Theory, Space, co-edited with Kate Darian-Smith and Liz Gunner), Nuttall had already argued that the themes in South African and Australian cultural and literary history are very similar: “the underside of the colonizing psyche, landscape theory and practice, the liminality of the emigrant position, and the discursive formation of settler sites in the field of empire” (Nuttall et all 1996, p 2). Landscape is of prime importance in these literatures, the editors contend, because with writing about landscape comes writing about identity, space, place and history. It turns “geographical territory into” something that is culturally “defined” (1996, p 3). Also, this process is closely connected to the concept of “national identity”, which “would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition, its topography, mapped, elaborated and enriched as a homeland” (1996, p 10). In South Africa as well as in Australia, “space and land ownership” have been consistently “prescribed in terms of race and power” 186
(1996, p 15), with major consequences in terms of the “contestations between indigenous and European populations over the naming, ownership and symbolic currency of land in South Africa and Australia” (ibid).
If South African and Australian writing have much in common as far as themes and cultural references are concerned, we might expect that the South African migrant writer would feel quickly at home in this country. But Mateer suggests this is not the case, so we have to examine what the particular ‘interference’ is in his case. Particularly since the end of apartheid as a system, white South African writers, both in and outside South Africa, have been investigating their position in ever increasing numbers. Often writing from a biographical starting point, people like J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Antjie Krog and Lisa Fugard have begun to ask difficult questions: where does my responsibility for my country’s racism lie, and how can I learn to live with the wrongs that have been done in my name? And, leading from that and the political changes: do I still have a place in South Africa, and if not, where do I go? This has resulted in a myriad of conflicted, but all very personal and emotional, writings. Breyten Breytenbach, for example lashes out, “in anguish and bitterness, in all directions” (Coetzee 2002, p 306). Writing about Breytenbach’s 1992 book Return to Paradise, Coetzee describes Breytenbach’s personal and authorial dilemma like this:
It is in this very traditional, very African realisation – that his deepest creative being is not his own but belongs to an ancestral consciousness – that gives rise to some of the pain and confusion recorded in Return to Paradise. For though Breytenbach may recognise how marginal he has become in what is nowadays on all sides, with varying degrees of irony, called ‘the new South Africa’, and may even enjoy dramatising himself as the one without a self, the bastard, the ‘nomadic nobody’, or, in his favourite postmodern figure, the face in the mirror, a textual shadow without substance, he knows that ultimately he owes his strength to his native earth and his ancestors (2002, p 307).
There are many interesting aspects to this passage, but something that needs exploring first is Breytenbach’s sense that he has become marginal, somebody even without a self, in post-apartheid South Africa. In this he is not alone. Writers like André Brink, Michael Heyns and of course Coetzee himself continue to wrestle with their position as white males. This is “Guilt, postcolonial white guilt”, Georgie Horrell contends in her essay ‘Post-Apartheid Disgrace: Guilty Masculinities in White 187
South African Writing’. This, she writes, “is a well-worn track in discourses”, and “post-Apartheid South African fiction and autobiography form a field which bears the marks of whiteness in painful transition” (Horrell 2005, p 2). If this is true for those still living in their homeland, how much more so will it be true for the migrant? The shame, guilt, humiliation and a feeling of redundancy expressed in autobiographical, confessional and unsettling writing – often, as in the case of Coetzee, without a resolution – must carry over into the work of South Africans abroad. There are many and diverse reasons for white South African writers to force themselves through this process. As Tony Simoes da Silva argues:
Faced with the rapidly changing political conditions that once framed the White self in Africa as a ‘stable’ locus of privilege and power, self-writing forms allow White writers in Southern Africa to reclaim some of the influence they once held over the telling of a national story and the making of cultural memory (2005, p 472).
It is, he says, a way to “exercise some control over the meaning of [the writers’] ‘lives”’, and maybe even “an attempt to negotiate the White person’s growing sense of political invisibility” (ibid). In Simoes da Silva’s reading of these narratives then, especially in the form of life-writing, they articulate the writers’ more or less hidden agenda to maintain a sense of self worth. White writers are trying to find an alternative to the space they once had, asserting identity in the process of writing, but unsure if anyone is listening. In this sense, perhaps there is a closer connection between writing from ‘home’ and ‘away’ for South Africans than for migrant writers in Australia from other countries. Still, white South Africans in Australia must find some accommodation to the new South Africa and to their new place of residence abroad. One problem in Australia is that the direct confrontation of colonialism, race- relations and the role of language, fundamental to South African identity, is not the preferred method of expression for Australian cultural arbiters. Writing oneself into a guilty victim persona can also be regarded with suspicion or scorn (similar to the reaction against the ‘whinging Pom’). This leads to a double dislocation for white South African writers: the ‘normal’ positionality-problem of the migrant is compounded by the slowly dawning realisation that you think you are talking about the same things as white Australians, but really you are not – not in content, but especially not in form. This is, I would propose, John Mateer’s situation. On the one hand, he seems a privileged white who should easily assimilate, but one who adopts 188
many of the features of the outspoken NESB minority writer. On the other, his South African origin places him in the ‘minority victim’ position of the ‘migrant writer’, but his Anglophone whiteness allows him to speak out in ways exceeding expections of that role. As I stated before, whiteness, in the context of South Africa, has very different connotations from whiteness almost everywhere else in the world. In American whiteness-studies, white is considered a non-colour, an invisibility, something that is unselfconscious because of its hegemonic location (see chapter 2). In South Africa, especially under Apartheid, white has always been very visible, as a colour and as a sign of power. In an early essay, written a year after the publication of his first book, Burning Swans, John Mateer attempts to explain the ‘baggage’ he brought with him to Australia. Being white and English-speaking meant that his whiteness did signify power, especially compared to non-white South Africans. But it also implied a certain in-between whiteness – linguistically outside of the centre of political power, but privileged nonetheless. Mateer’s family, like many white, English-speaking South Africans, could not make up their mind about where they belonged. On the one hand, they felt they had little in common with what they saw as “revolutionaries” and “communists”: Mateer’s father viewed poet Breytenbach as a “shit-stirrer” (Mateer 1998, geocities p 2), and there was a fear that the end of apartheid would entail “massacres of white people” (Mateer 2008, interview 8 June). On the other hand, “we weren’t on the Afrikaner, white, National Party, apartheid-is-the-only-answer side either” (ibid). While in Canada for a brief period during his childhood, the young Mateer even realised that the only other child at the school with whom he had anything in common was a black Nigerian boy. “We were both Africans. It was a type of crazy logic I held onto, because it gave some sort of stability and belonging. South Africa normally was all about fragmenting and dividing people and making them fight one another, but this gave me a sort of comradeship” (ibid). His whiteness made Mateer think about what his ‘duty’ was to his birthplace and how that translated into Australian culture: “By not speaking, am I being complicit with behaviours many call ‘evil’? Doesn’t that make me evil? Does Africa have anything to do with me? What language do I have? Am I ‘human’?” (ibid). In Australia he soon realised “these doubts” were called “’white guilt”’, but the label did not do away with a sense of confusion and debt. Afrikaners in South Africa, in Mateer’s view, could be forgiven after apartheid because they had been guilty. For 189
most English-speaking liberal whites, there was no such easy way out. By not necessarily ‘believing’ in the system, but also not opposing it – and profiting from its consequences –, they had “invalidated” their “sense of humanity, of ethics” “in the eyes of the world” (1995, p 55). The consequence for most English-speaking South Africans, Mateer maintains, was “shame”: “Many tried to lose their accents as soon as possible” and “When asked about the politics of their ex-country, their problematic ‘place of origin’, they would sadly shrug” (ibid). This, of course, is Mateer’s view of the situation in which he and his fellow countrymen in Australia find themselves. There is a possibility that this has more to do with Mateer’s personal experiences than with hard evidence. In 2008, Khawaja and Mason investigated a large group of South African migrants in Australia, looking for “predictors of psychological distress”. In general, the levels of distress were low and getting lower the longer they stayed in Australia. Only their perceived impossibility of going back to South Africa (because of high crime rates and changed political circumstances) contributed – a little – to feelings of loss and grief. Despite the battery of questions these migrants had to answer, ‘shame’ was not a word or a concept that cropped up (Khawaja and Mason 2008, p 225-246).
After Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Mateer, “as a ‘white’, English-speaking South African in Australia”, “felt that [he] had been returned to life”. Therefore: “If I was to turn from being nearly dead to being meaningful I knew I would have to learn how to speak” (ibid). Understandably but not very cautiously, “as a ‘white’ I decided to use what I had learnt under the reign of apartheid and communicate those insights to Australians” (ibid). Mateer started to compare South Africa to Australia – “Australian capitalism is a lot like apartheid, but without the blatant legislation” (1995, p 56) – and quickly learnt that his critics felt that he had “no moral rights” (ibid) to talk like that:
I was forced to confront the fact that as a ‘white’ South African émigré who recognised his own moral, historical and ontological vacuity I had no claim to universal human rights or moral imperatives, or even the right to the ear of people who weren’t in a similar predicament to me. I felt I was compelled to be empty. To become empty (1995, p 57).
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In a way this seems to refer back to the dilemmas most migrants face, something Chambers (see chapter 4) described as the requirement to realise that they are “simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the situation at hand, experiencing a constantly challenged identity, and realise that identity is, in itself, like history and home, a cultural construct” (Chambers 1994, p 6). It also brings to mind Brian Castro’s warning that “to be able to speak at all is to be aware of not playing the game, […] the desire to be adopted, the rites of inclusion’ (Castro 2004-2005, p 47). For a migrant writer in general it takes a courageous disposition “to speak at all” – and a willingness not to be accepted because of it –, let alone, as Mateer tried here, to attack the core in the process. Comparing Australian capitalism to apartheid is dangerous even for writers within the core, but even more so for white – and therefore ‘culpable’ – migrant writers from South Africa. In his quest to investigate the consequences of his skin colour, migrant-status and national origin in his new country, John Mateer started his writing career by looking at the body, in Burning Swans (1994). The title refers to the bodies of the victims of necklacing, and bodies – Mateer’s own body, women’s bodies, bodies of people he meets in the street – are much, if not all, of what he can see here. Corporeality, violent corporality, is everywhere: blood, arms like broken wings (Mateer 1994, p 15), melting angels (1994, p 16), ears like cool shells (1994, p 17), fading urine (1994, p 19), mute mouths (Ibid), shards in throats (1994, p 20), a “calcium heart” (1994, p 42), torture by way of “having hot eggs/ splattered in [his] armpits” (1994, p 35), and “frosted semen” (1994, p 47). The poet seems almost obsessively to feel for his outward, bruised, appearance, as if by describing how he and others look, this will tell him something about who they are. Having been brought up in South Africa, where skin is seen as a marker for almost everything else, this sounds logical. This writer, who is trying to find out how his colour (and therefore his position) determine what he can and cannot say, is always, almost painfully, aware of his face – a face he feels he needs to “peel off” (1994, p 14) before he can belong to a group of men at a bar. A face that answers, seemingly separate from the rest of his body or his mind (1994, p 15). It soon becomes uncomfortably clear that the origin of this problem lies in South Africa and the fact that he wonders whether “Africans [can] be white” (1994, p 27). His face, and its colour, becomes a burden, something that automatically labels him: “By hearing his own words/ and staring in the mirror/ he learns the person/ they think he is” (1994, p 86). There is no real choice, Mateer 191
seems to conclude: you are what your skin colour says you are. Interesting here is that this painful investigation into the body could be easier understood if the body in question had been visibly different. Australian migrant literature has a long tradition of non-white writers describing the corporeal difference between themselves and the new world they live in and the dislocation and identity issues that are often the result. Also, as mentioned earlier, to be read as a migrant in Australia, this visible difference is imperative. Ethnicity, as Sneja Gunew wrote, has to be able to be “performed” (Gunew 2004, p 67). Mateer, with few tools of performance at his disposal, nevertheless tries to communicate the difference of the migrant. Almost anticipating that his readers and critics will not be able to acknowledge his migrant experience or his dislocation and identity issues, Mateer seems to direct them, time and time again (and more and more violently), to the bodily proof. As was to be expected, his reviewers do not know what to do with all this physicality and certainly do not recognise it as a migrant issue. Instead, they focus on Mateer’s style. Alan Gould, writing for Quadrant, finds it “impossible to engage with [this] book” (Gould 1995, p 79). He gets annoyed by its “sheer maundering garrulity” (ibid), especially given the poet’s complaint of being unable to speak (Mateer 1994, p 17, 57, 86, 94). He concludes “What awful tosh!” (1995, p 80). David McCooey in Westerly experiences all the talk of sex and violence as “brilliantly awful”. Mateer’s writing, he feels, suffers “from an inability to consider itself in any way other than totally serious” (McCooey 1994, p 96), and that is not meant as a compliment. His review ends up stating that Mateer’s lines “I have nothing to say/ and I’m saying it” (Mateer 1994, p 76) are “unfortunately apt” (McCooey 1994, p 96). Amanda Wilson is not much more enthusiastic. In the Australian Book Review, she concludes that the poet has “nothing to say that I can hear” (ibid). Throughout his career Mateer has wrestled with his South African whiteness, especially as a migrant in a white country that does not necessarily understand his dilemma. In his 1997 collection Anachronism, it seems as if Mateer is almost literally unravelling. The violence, this time, is mainly self-inflicted: sex, drugs and rock and roll drip off the pages. Mateer’s narrator is continually testing his body, abusing it, seeing what it can take before it breaks. The body comes across as something that is abject and hated, something that the writer wants to get out of. Or, as the epigraph says: “When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself” (Suzuki in Mateer 1997, p 9). “All day I have 192 been feeling/ as though dismembered” (1997, p 32), Mateer writes, while he tries to convince himself that “That evil face/ you recognise/ in the mirror/ is not evil” (1997, p 36). The more the poems go on, the more distant the narrative voice seems to feel from his body, as if by making it go away, he will gain a freedom he does not have, while still in “possession” of it. “I am the usual corpse” (1997, p 49), he declares almost hopefully: “A familiar kitchen knife severs/ my legs, then my torso, my arms/ and quarters my lunar bone head, Let them fall/ away…” (1997, p 51). This lack of face, and then of body, sounds to me like the vacuity, the emptiness, Mateer talked about in the above-mentioned essay from 1995. The text does penance, in a way, for the poet’s whiteness, for being a migrant South African white, somebody who feels he has no reason to exist, at least not within his offending skin. Maybe if he can shed that skin, he can “become all mind” (1997, p 68), but the expectation is that the reality is even worse than that: “On this site I am a ghost. I am a voice that’s off his/ head” (1997, p 89). There is nothing left but the knowledge that “[I am] now/ a slaughter of voices” (1997, p 11): “fucked-up/ mentally apartheid” (1997, p 19). Again there is the impossibily to speak, to find a voice to describe the experience. If the body is not different enough to help with the performance of otherness, and the mind only leads to “a slaughter of voices”, what is left for the poet or his narrators? As Docker and Fisher wrote, the journey of the outsider can be “wayward, unusual, challenging, eccentric, irritating, unsettling” (Docker and Fisher 2000, p 16), and John Mateer, at this moment in his career, seems to have become crushed under its weight. He is unable to “release the prepressed”, “‘perform’ a ventriloquism of new identities” or “construct new biographies and genealogies of and for themselves” (ibid). Instead of gain, there is more and more loss, and a growing inability to connect with his audience in a way they can understand. Significantly, most reviewers reading Mateer in relation to ‘Australian’ literature do not recognise the connection between personal angst, colour and South African migrancy. Michael Costigan in the Australian Book Review identifies the violence that Mateer is inflicting on himself, but stops at declaring that it makes him uncomfortable. He locates Mateer as “an activist writer” (Costigan 1997, p 47), but only in the political sense, not the one where the political is driven by the personal. Lynette Kirby, in the Australian Multicultural Book Review, starts by saying that Mateer’s “poetic voice is that of South Africa, coloured by Australia” (Kirby 1997, p 32), and that “many poems are angry and hardnosed, all the more compelling for their 193
cold, rigid exterior, their glittering menace” (ibid). She recognises “a pain that seems relentless” (ibid), and that “Mateer writes the ‘agony’ of the human condition” (1997, p 33). The poems, she argues, “reflect the imprisonment of self; we are made aware of the ‘self’ not being there”, after which she quotes the passages about dismembering and the slaughter of voices. There is, she says, a “fundamental and sometimes quietly desperate hold on the intangible voice” (1997, p 34), but determines this to be “the stuff of life” (ibid), not something that is inextricably connected to the particular life lived by the white migrant poet.
Leaving Barefoot Speech (2000) for later, since that is mostly concerned with language and memory, in Loanwords (2002), Mateer seems to be on a road of discoving Australia, almost literally unearthing it: the place, the landscape, the birds, the colours. It is more a ‘where am I?’, than a ‘what am I?’, but the body is still important. For the first time, he is more explicit about his white migrant experience, as if feeling that he needs to spell this out to make communication easier. Mateer’s narrator describes himself as “invisibly edged”, a “skinless bodymind” (Mateer 2002, p 30). From this, “All voice is failure” (2002, p 50) and “The translated man I am is becoming numerical: zero, ok” (2002, p 55). Mateer recognises that there is still an “urge”, a “will to see one’s self reflected in the faces of others” (2002, p 92), but maintains that the only identity or self he has got left is that of an “Ex-” (2002, p 89). It seems a natural, if slightly disturbing progression: from ‘losing’ his body in his first book and his voice in his second, here Mateer feels forced to discard his identity. The past is still there, but barely: it is translated and ex; zero. The poet is succumbing to a form of cultural schizophrenia, losing his footing in both countries, belonging to none. John Mateer is less and less able to find what Rushdie called the “capacity for imagining and reimagining the world” (Rushdie 1992, p 280), or to find a language or method to forge a relationship with his readers. Three years later, in The Ancient Capital of Images (2005), in the section that deals specifically with South Africa, Mateer revisits the old problems of colour and belonging. Describing people looking at him during a visit to South Africa, while he is talking to a female friend, “a descendant of slaves”, he imagines them thinking “That’s a White boy talking to a Coloured girl” (Mateer 2005, p 8). There is also the difference he feels between himself and his friend, a “visionary”, while he is nothing but “a poet, another name for emptiness” (ibid). There is confusion, when another 194
poet, “a New South African”, “holds his fist out to me” and says “Welcome home” (2005, p 11). Home, the message seems to be here, what does home mean, if the colour-issue is still there: “I look at my hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing,/ Why, without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?” (ibid). Things in the new South Africa, the narrator finds, have changed. Mateer has become, as he calls this section, a “Makwerekwere” (2005, p 5): a hated foreigner, in his home. The use of “Makwerekwere” is a remarkable artistic conceit here. In South Africa, the term is a derogatory one, used by black South Africans to describe black illegal immigrants, mostly from Zimbabwe, the Congo, Mozambique and Nigeria. They suffer from many types of violence, institutional and otherwise. For Mateer, a white man travelling relatively freely through South Africa and able to depart at leisure, to identify with this particular group of people, seems odd. What can be said, though, is that after having surrendered body, voice and identity earlier, now also the past seems lost. The poet is not even an ‘ex’ anymore, but an outsider in his country of birth; a non-entity in Australia, a despised nonentity in South Africa. Resisting the temptation to delve too deeply into this poet’s psychological state, as a literary critic it might be possible to account for Mateer’s literary response to his new country in a different way. Although the migrant experience informs the work of Ruth Park and Alex Miller probably as profoundly as it does Mateer’s, there is a possibility that the difference in medium plays a role here. Mateer’s chosen vehicle is poetry, and a very distinctly personal and emotional variety at that. As many of Mateer’s critics have commented, readers are presented with raw feelings; sometimes the sensation is akin to watching self-anatomy taking place. The poet is cutting away his skin in full view, exposing all the blood and gore underneath. It is a very intimate, sometimes almost too private exhibition; because we as readers can feel forced to look, our instinct is to turn away. This is especially the case in instances where the poet blames a ‘you’ that might be his reader for his pain. Park and Miller have a completely different way of conveying their issues. They write prose and therefore have to – and want to – adhere to the rules of narrative. They tell a story, which is, as Miller said “the […] story of us” [my italics] (Miller 2006, p 6-7); not just the story of the tortured writer, but something that is communal, shared with the reader. There is an attempt at communication here, at describing experiences that go beyond the personal, which makes them easier to digest and fully hear. Both Miller and Park may start with “self-portraiture” (ibid), but within their responsibility as 195 fiction writers, they translate the literal and the personal into the universal. This process makes it possible for readers to connect to story and writer, and also to position themselves within this broader scope.
Indeed, over time, Mateer starts building more and more walls between himself and his critics (and readers). Although he should have realised by now that the relationship between his whiteness and migrancy cannot be heard in Australia, he keeps coming back to it, wanting to explain. The way he does this, though, alienates him even more from his listeners. After all these years, Mateer says, he does not “really accept” that he is white, because “that is a political category that apartheid created”. He argues that this makes it a “discursive category”, and refusing it therefore is a “discursive act”:
White doesn’t exist, white is a discussion, not a given. To call someone white is like calling them black: it is simplifying the circumstance. I understand that saying you are black, for instance, is a useful political act. But it is also very shallow, because black people are much more than that. A Zulu person in Johannesburg is much more than black. There are a whole set of cultural and historical and linguistic circumstances that he is a product of. Black is the least interesting of them (Mateer 2008, interview, 9 June).
Again, Mateer’s statement that Apartheid created ‘white’ as a political category, is noteworthy, especially because it seems to be historically incorrect. Even before Apartheid was introduced by the National Party government in 1948, segregational laws and practices were already firmly in place. Apartheid reiterated and institutionalised the status quo, it did not “create” it. Furthermore, I find it intriguing what Mateer does here: first he seems to locate colour as a political category, then as simply a colour that is not significant in politics, something outside of “cultural, historical and linguistic circumstances”. What seems to bother him most in the whole discussion about colour and power is that the focus on colour locates him, the white migrant South African, as “one of those”, overwhelming his personal story. “They are not interested in a story, just in an easy way of categorising you. There is not much power in being interested. The power lies in including or excluding and it is more powerful to exclude. You are either an insider or an outsider. If you are ‘something else’, you are not spoken about. Which is often my status” (ibid). Of course, this is not just Mateer’s status; story telling has always been as essential as it has been 196
problematic for many, especially, migrant writers. Conveying personal experience can be especially fraught. For one, this type of literature is necessarily comparative, in that it contrasts identity and circumstances in the first home with those in the second. Migrant writers have to walk a tight-rope here: anything that sounds like criticism of Australia can easily be interpreted as ungratefulness to the host. This, in turn, can lead to exclusion. In a poem published in Anne-Marie Smith’s anthology Culture is…Australian Stories Across Cultures, Iranian-Australian writer Ali Alizadeh writes:
Don’t be correct but compliant if you want to be one of us, or at least one of our ‘ethnics’ that we lampoon and alienate at will; or else we’ll name you an ‘illegal’, a ‘Muslim terrorist’ and ‘evil’. You prefer that to being a good immigrant, mate? (Alizadeh in Smith 2008, p 31)
So Mateer is not alone, although he believes he deserves a special position because of the fact that he is a white South African migrant – he has the extra hurdle of being the same without really being allowed to be the same. His solution to this conundrum is to refuse either of these labels, starting to classify himself as an “ex-white South African”. “Ex-South African” because that is, Mateer maintains, the way South Africans who still live in the country view South Africans who have left. The ex- white part is, evidently, a lot more complicated. It means, Mateer contends, “refusing the naturalisation of being white”: “it is my way of specifying the dynamics” (Mateer 2008, interview, 9 June). To Mateer, “racial categories are bizarre” because they are determined not by individual people themselves, but by others. The example he uses here comes from the Aboriginal community, where, “you have to be recognised by other Aborigines to be an Aboriginal”. In short: identity is not something you have or choose yourself, but something others prescribe for you. This way, Mateer suggests, it becomes part of politics, when in fact, “in a metaphysical sense, you want your identity to be free” (ibid). If ideal freedom also relies on communal acceptance of your identity, then we can see Mateer’s frustration at being excluded and categorised in a way that he feels silences him. Doing away with categories altogether might not be the most realistic or effective way of doing things, but it does explain a lot about Mateer’s desperation when it comes to issues of identity and positionality. It also underpins Ghassan Hage’s assertion (see chapter 4) that “to acquire national culture – 197 its language, history, customs and rites – is always somehow less than to be born with them” (Hage 1996, p 467). It seems Mateer is unable to create for himself a position to speak from that somehow fits within the core, or can at least be heard by that core. Alternatively, he is unable to position himself as a migrant writer, with a migrant story to tell.
One of the possible reasons for this can be that from the start almost everything Mateer sees in Australia is distorted by memories of South Africa and therefore made strange, echoing the experiences of the first settlers to Australia. In Burning Swans, the narrator “attempt[s] to peel the newspaper, but it’s soaked through with invisible blood” (Mateer 1994, p 13). “There/ are possible images and there is the remembered” (1994, p 65), he realises, and the consequence of this is a new, frightening, them and us: “In/ the crowd that everyone/ else is I/ am lost” (1994, p 76). Three years later, in Anachronism, Mateer’s protagonist cannot even differentiate between past and present anymore:
Afrikaans songs pace around in my sleep, sisters and old friends wake up with your face, and we love like meditation, love as though proving there is: there is:
our mind here: ooglidde soos vel oor amal, eyelids like skin over us all (Mateer 1997, p 41).
Between waking and sleeping, there are overlapping realities, complete with languages that intertwine. The repetition of the phrase “there is:” is telling as well: it is as if the poet needs to convince himself and his readers that there is something of importance and permanence there after all. Driving the Great Ocean Road in Loanwords, thirteen years after Mateer’s migration, he speaks of “ancestral memories, returning me home” (Mateer 2002, p 24). The speaker knows himself to be “in his place and another” (2002, p 44) and has started to wonder “Who is to say there’s ground under your feet?” (2002, p 62) – a question, that even in its wording, is reminiscent of Salman Rushdie. It presents the eternal migrant quandary, the consequence of displacement that can lead, according to Rushdie, to an identity that is “at once plural and partial” (Rushdie 1992, p 15). 198
Where memories are disfiguring the present, this is compounded by the experience of migration, especially the rejection Mateer feels he encounters, both in Australia and in South Africa. There is the “Hong Kong-born/ Chinese man. Basically he tells me I/ don’t belong in Australia” (Mateer 1997, p 51), and “Repeatedly addressed as ‘a European male’”, he cannot help complaining about
this bitter loneliness here? – Should we play more sport, did I go to the wrong school, or is a question always a problem? A philosopher once told me: After he realised, he had to go for very long walks by himself. He had to learn to talk to himself (1997, p 72).
“Feeling both familiar and estranged in South Africa and Australia” (Mateer in Kellas 2006, radio-transcript p 3), Mateer struggles with the same dilemma explored by JM Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year. Coetzee’s writer too is mentally “stuck” in Africa: “Everywhere he looks he sees Africa” (Coetzee 2007, p 78), and the consequence of this is that “he doesn’t understand modernity” that comes to him in the shape of, for instance, Australian politics. This flaw cannot be forgiven by his hosts. Both the writer’s adversary neighbour Alan and a letter-writer to the Australian are quoted as scathing in their response to the writer’s criticism of his new country. Coetzee’s narrator remarks that they told him that, “if I didn’t like Australia, suggested the writer, I should go back to where I came from, or, if I preferred Zimbabwe, to Zimbabwe” (2007, p 140). Coetzee’s protagonist is stunned: “[It] took the wind out of my sails. What a sheltered life I have led! In the rough-and-tumble world of politics, a letter like this counts as no more than a pinprick, yet me it numbs like a blow from a lead cosh” (ibid). Mateer too feels constantly attacked and silenced in Australia. The more time goes by, the more he knows himself to be a foreigner, an outsider, somebody people do not want to listen to. Yet, his relationship with post-apartheid South Africa is equally complicated. In a 2001 ‘Letter from Durban’, Mateer describes his appearance at a poetry festival in Durban, South Africa. Being presented in one of the national newspapers as “a returned exile”, he becomes more and more suspicious of questions people ask him: “In their questioning is a not so subtle politics of decorum: Are you a foreigner? If you are, mind your manners” (Mateer 2001, p 46). He feels that he is “required to be positive in my opinion of South Africa”, which is “an unfair expectation, I think” 199
(ibid). He knows there are limitations to what he is allowed to do. Do not criticize “their country” (2001, p 47), but also: do not talk about anything but South Africa: “when I read my poems about Australia and Indonesia, I had the impression that I was becoming incomprehensible, my words abstract, my voice fugitive” (2001, p 46). The way Mateer views his position, this looks like the ultimate cultural confusion: he believes he is not able to talk about the old or the new country, and feels negated and outside the cultural context in both. This is an extreme instance of the literary expression of migrancy, but it serves to illustrate how migrancy coupled with whiteness can be ‘mis-heard’ and silenced. It is consistent with the reception of the other writers discussed in this thesis. The difference between Mateer on one hand and Park and Miller on the other is that Mateer focuses so much on his perceived invisibility and inaudibility that he allows this to become the heart of his work. Basically he writes about not being able to write, while Park and Miller tell the story of communication – one that might be flawed, but still has connection as its goal. This way, Mateer almost invites rejection, where Park and Miller induce being subsumed into the core. Both Park and Miller have, in a way, ‘settled down’ to write about Australia, something that has facilitated their inclusion and the invisibility that is the consequence of that. Mateer, who continues to write about his alienation, foregrounds his migrant position while at the same time fighting it. In doing so, because of his origins, he presents an unwitting (?) affront and challenge to a white Australia not necessarily inclined to confront its own subjectivity and politics. Mateer, critics realise, does “write with a personal knowledge of cultural disjunction” (Wilson 1994, p 51), but although they recognise Mateer’s biographical references to South Africa, the connection between being a white South African migrant and the disjunction in question is not made. Reviewing Anachronism, for example, Michael Costigan claims that the lines “I’m lucky living here where volumes/ of poems are published, where dreamers/ letter the sounds for their judicious Unknown” (Mateer 1997, p 72) are written to express “Mateer’s gratitude” (Costigan 1997, p 47). What he misses here, is that the poem, tellingly named ‘Ironically’, talks about the narrator being “repeatedly addressed as ‘a European male’”, and the feeling this brings about: “bitter loneliness” (Mateer 1997, p 72). Another way of misreading Mateer is to read him as having eagerly and willingly traded in his African heritage for an Australian one. Peter Minter, in Cordite, for example, claims that Mateer “appears to have absorbed the 200 most influential trends in contemporary Australian poetry. Postmodernism, romanticism, surrealism, whatever, it’s all there” (Minter 1997, p 22). Reading Mateer through the Australian (or generally contemporary Western) prism in this way, turns his struggle to become almost into an act of mimicry, whereas it might be more an attempt to find new selfhood; to find a voice that encapsulates his disjointed identity. This Babel-like confusion gets even more pronounced when Mateer’s treatment of language is the issue. Finding a voice (and a language) as a white South African writer is difficult enough, but as a migrant Mateer also has to find a way to communicate with and within Australia(n-English). Again, Mateer is not alone in this. Most non-English-speaking migrant writers deal with this challenge. A possible reason why Mateer cannot see it as a general issue, might be because he feels part of the Anglo-Celtic core (on the basis of the fact that he is white, English-speaking and culturally similar) and very much not. This is the interesting double bind of this group of migrant writers, both inside and outside of the core and inside and outside of the periphery or non-core. It is a confusing position, which possibly even complicates a clear view from within, as seems to be the case with Mateer. Also, the risk here is that, for reviewers at least, Mateer’s complaints about his troubles sound exaggerated, simply because there are so many others wrestling with similar – if not the same – problems. Focussing on the Afrikaans vs. English language issue first, Mateer presents us with a narrator who has “remembered shards in throat talking words against me” (Mateer 1994, p 20). There are the old languages, two of them (one ‘native’ and one taught in school), in his head, making it difficult to come up with a voice for the present. There is a sense of linguistic loss there: “Very few people/ ever experience the fading of a language. To/ sit up late at night in the shadow of a desklamp/ and attempt to read the few books you bought just/ because every voice around you is someone else’s” (1994, p 25). Here yet again we can sense the double bind: of course it is not exactly true that “very few people” “experience the fading of a language”. Ask NESB migrants; ask Indigenous Australians. In a country where countless Indigenous Australians do not even know the language of their ancestors because it has been taken away from them, Mateer’s complaint feels empty, even shallow. In comparison with NESB migrants, who have been forced to do away with their language (and culture) altogether, Mateer’s lines sound either politically naïve or wilfully oblivious to the position of others much worse off than himself. Again, I 201
would suggest that this might be the consequence of Mateer’s cultural schizophrenia: neither ‘at home’ in the core or in the non-core and traumatised by this position. This takes him into dangerous territory, though, and puts him at risk of alienating both his readership and his reviewers. It is also clear that Mateer’s blind spot becomes bigger over time, partly because his feeling of (linguistic) displacement starts to take up more and more place on the page, both in the poetry and the essays. In his first book Mateer tries to hear both voices in his head: the one that specifically links him to Africa and the one that sounds like it could communicate with Australia. With ‘Other Language’, Mateer writes a long, four-page poem in both languages: a line of Afrikaans, an English translation or version, another line of Afrikaans, and so forth. It is also, tellingly I think, a poem about death and dying, darkness and blood. Further on in the book, the tone is less gloomy, but there are still pointers to the writer’s divided ear: “Thursday. Donderdag” (1994, p 51), or, a couple of pages later without translation: “I think: Ons oë maar niet” (1994, p 53). “In Afrikaans we would/ say monster (which means ‘specimen’)/ and laugh at the allusions, the animals/ of life” (1994, p 57). In our interview, Mateer elaborated on this question of Afrikaans and English:
What I came to understand was that language, especially for English-speaking South Africans, is a problem. […] There was a political polarity. What this did to poetry was that it created a real dilemma: if you wanted to write a love poem, people would accuse you of being bourgeois and self-absorbed. So people didn’t. And that is how we lost the language, because you lose the emotional correspondence between language and intention. My early poems were struggling with this. But what they were also trying to do was say something without explicating it. They were trying to create a poetic language of images or suggestions, without statements. I presume I was self-censoring, in a way. I didn’t want to tell people something about South Africa, or about myself, in a language they expected. I didn’t want to say: I didn’t support apartheid, or: whites are bastards. I didn’t want to enter into this language of pre-determined meanings. The resistance and the silencing, therefore, were partly because of that. There are characters in Coetzee’s novels who fall silent after a while. They realise that they run into a barrier, that people on the other side are not responding. Silence is the only way to retain their power. In a way that was what I was doing. There is power in silence: I am not giving you what you expect me to (Mateer, 2008, interview, 8 June).
Language, for Mateer, is therefore a site of contention, of fear, of slim possibilities as well as of very strict guidelines, politically and positionally. Reading Breytenbach as a young man, Mateer was fascinated by the way Breytenbach was 202
taking Afrikaans outside of what it had been used for in day-to-day practice: to hold up a fascist state. He was claiming the language as his own, for him to use for a very different goal. His is a poetry of enthusiasm, hope, love, openness and energy. In that way he was attacking Afrikaans, opening it up to different uses. I found that exhilarating (ibid).
As Breytenbach himself wrote, in his 1999 memoir: “Our specific languague, Afrikaans, is the visible history and the ongoing process not only of bastardisation, but also of metamorphosis” (Breytenbach 1999, p 175-176). Starting off as a creolised dialect of Dutch, it was long seen by the English speakers in South Africa as a “mongrel” language, only used by “peasants” (Giliomee 2003, p 367). Apartheid ‘purified’ Afrikaans and gave it “the grammar of violence” and the “syntax of destruction” (Breytenbach 1983, p 356-357). Breytenbach feels that it is exactly this bastardisation and history that gives Afrikaans its power and beauty. It is “a new avatar of that supple lingo of seafarers, slaves and nomads – of people who constantly have to invent themselves” (Breytenbach 1993, p 211). Again, there is the impetus of re-invention here, a call to use the changed situation to express and explain one’s self. Through the writing of people like Breytenbach, Mateer realised that in South African literature, what is often used is “an English under-layered with the possibility of the other languages” that are being used in the country. “This idea that there is another language under the language I use is something that I’m very engaged with”, he wrote in 2003. Not just as a “linguistic device”, but especially because “this is where I am from: this ‘mess’” (Mateer 2003, p 24). By the monoglot Anglophone Australian, this “mess” cannot be heard, and to the struggling NESB writer, Mateer’s Anglophone facility seems to disqualify him from claiming migrant angst. He does have the capacity (unlike Miller) to mark his own language as different (‘wog’ English), and this is what he seems to try to do, but then fails to do. Instead of heeding the call for re-invention (and maybe re-unification of self) Mateer stops at explaining the “mess” and blaming his readers for misunderstanding him. In an essay Mateer writes after “the uninformed and dismissive critical response to Burning Swans” (Mateer 1995, p 53), he tries to clarify the multiple voices in his head and on the page. “For writers who work in a culture different from the one which formed their languages [note the plural] and values, it is difficult to communicate without the setbacks of misunderstanding”, he argues: “yet I realise that an audience’s reception is a result of their knowledge and context” (ibid). So he goes 203
on to explain why he has used “the Afrikaans poetry tradition and its influences”. For quite a while after migration, Mateer says, he was “uncomfortable in Australian English, South African English and Afrikaans”: “All voices were too loud for me. Especially my own” (1995, p 55). He stresses he “constructed hermetic personal languages, languages of images, languages in which I could attempt to speak about my selfish loss. As a poet I felt I had no moral rights. Hurtfully, almost everyone agreed with me about this” (1995, p 56). In his use of Afrikaans, he felt “I was always consciously alien”, because as an English speaking South African his language was not “attached to the land”, nor did his language give him any “tangible reference to that earth” (ibid). “Afrikaans was the whip the Lord invented”, while the English speaker was “incongruous” (1995, p 57). Given all of this, Mateer asserts that it was his “task as a ‘poet’ to attempt to formulate a voice by listening to the disturbing echoes of my synthetic speech. My listening was an investigation of strata of pain and history” (ibid). The “slender, slender hope” here, was that this voice could, in the end, “be heard” (ibid). Or maybe, and more to the point, Mateer’s effort has had less to do with being heard by others, but with being heard by himself. So far, it seems, the particular constructions of multiculturalism and migrant writing as outlined earlier, in combination with the specific issues of this writer, have prevented this from happening. Mateer engages with this particular issue in Barefoot Speech and Loanwords Mateer. Barefoot Speech is even divided in sections that allude to language difficulties: ‘Forms in Silence’, ‘Echo’, and ‘Silence in Forms’. ‘Echo’, a poem dedicated to and about JM Coetzee ends like this: “Beware of those bearing grief in comprehensible words. / Beware of your mouths” (Mateer 2000, p 39). Again, there is the old and seemingly inescapable conclusion that “I have no speaking voice” (2000, p 56). There is only “silence”, “unimaginable speech” (2000, p 57): “our language, my being is like/ a legless lizard (word appendages/ defunct in this new terrain” (2000, p 67). In Loanwords, this feeling of inadequacy has grown into a desperation. “The sentence, then, is an unrealisable mountain”, Mateer writes here (Mateer 2002, p 19): “any sentence is a road into rippling magnesium flame” (2002, p 30). Words have become “like glass” (2002, p 48), and “only/ loanwords arrive in his mouth,/ like placebos or wisdom teeth” (2002, p 49). The speaker feels “disarmed” (Ibid), and this has profound consequences for his identity: “Who am I? asks the mouth. The ear does not respond,/ except in the negative, with oceans of sound” (2002, p 52). Multiple 204
englishes, and another, tainted language (Afrikaans) as an under-layer: it does not make it easy for Mateer to write poetry in Australia. A complicating factor is what Mateer chooses to say in the language he does use. From 1997 onwards there is one issue that the poet keeps coming back to; a subject that he feels should be on the top of the list in Australia: colonialism. Mateer includes “(Post-)Colonialism: The Twin Secrets of South Africa and Australia” in his first collection, Burning Swans. It reads:
I feel that Africa and Australia are twin secrets, both bitumen smooth on the inside, mentalities, to use another’s phrase, islands of the dead in ‘perpetual mourning’(Mateer 1994, p 97).
According to Mateer’s valuation of Australia, the country has an “ahistorical present” (1994, blurb), meaning that it does not deal with its history of colonisation, “with its clearing of the land of the Aboriginal peoples and the emptying of the signs of their presence in preparation for their absolute dispossession” (Mateer 2007, p 103). This is in opposition, Mateer claims, to South Africa, “a country in which, throughout its history, colonisation has been resisted on every level” (ibid). However, this is but Mateer’s version of Australian and South African history, and others disagree. For instance, Marilyn Lake, in an investigation into trans-national histories of “white man’s countries”, states that this “defensive project” was shared by most (ex-) colonies from the nineteenth century (Lake 2003, p 352). “A special politics of exclusion and segregations was common to them all and the ‘white man’ always ruled the ‘natives’” (ibid). She quotes the American writer Lothrop Stoddard, who in 1923 wrote that “Nothing is more striking than the instinctive solidarity which binds together Australians and Afrikanders [sic], Californians and Canadians into a ‘sacred union’” (ibid). But according to Mateer, there is “a fear of articulation” in this country, and that is the “cause of Australian culture’s ineffective critique of colonisation” (Mateer 2007, p 103). That in turn, he argues, leads to “the denial of Aboriginal people’s suffering”, “repressed xenophobia”, and a “gap of suspicion and silence” (Mateer 2007, p 104). The way to fill this gap, Mateer feels, is with something he calls “mirroring”. Mirroring, in Mateer’s definition, is “a process parallel with the generalised experience of learning, and, more deeply, with that of language acquisition” (2007, p 103). To him, it is a way to use a “mode of localised 205
language” to articulate “the dilemma of alienation” (ibid). This way, what is created is “a space wherein the poet personifies the possibility of conversation” (2007, p 104). As far as I understand Mateer’s logic, with this “mirroring” he embarks on two separate projects at the same time. Firstly, his uses the device to get a better view of his own self, in order to alleviate his feelings of alienation. This is problematic, because it can be seen as a way of trying to get away from the responsibilities that your position, in this case that of a white South African migrant writer, brings. JM Coetzee argues that is impossible to ignore, however much you might want to, that to:
The generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name. Those among them who endeavour to salvage personal pride by pointedly refusing to bow before the judgement of the world suffer from a burning resentment, a bristling anger at being condemned without adequate hearing, that in psychic terms may turn out to be an equally heavy burden (Coetzee 2007, p 39-40).
This, of course, is a problem comparable with that of white Australians, in their historical responsibility towards Aboriginal Australians. Another reason why it is problematic for Mateer to use his “mirroring” to see and even rebuild a self is that accusations of appropriation become possible there. The problem of ‘creative borrowing’ becomes vexed when there is a power imbalance between the appropriator and the source of the appropriation. Particularly when no permission has been given to take from the minority culture and transform it into something that is part of the majority culture, the people whose heritage has been used can feel robbed. There is also the counter-argument, which is that using something ‘old’ to turn it into something ‘new’, facilitates a fresh outlook on the original. This way the artist is not taking away, but adding. Whether this act can be seen in a negative or a positive way, has a lot to do with the reason why it occurs and the manner in which it is used. In Mateer’s case I would say that where his aim is only a better understanding of his own (white) self, criticism of his use of black material without permission is valid. On the other hand, though, where dialogue is the intention (and where the material is on public record or permission for its use is given by those most concerned), I think his “mirroring” serves a purpose and cannot immediately be rejected as improper behaviour. 206
Again, I would say that the biggest problem with Mateer’s mirroring is that the ‘source’ of the mirror is mostly the poet himself and only him. According to Nicholas Birns, ‘mirroring’, in Lacan’s view, had to do with the consciousness of the infant, seeing
its own image and [assuming] that its own self was the entire world. Life as actually lived, though, cannot, experientially, be adequate to the idealized image in the mirror. So the mirror stage is ‘imaginary’ in a double sense; pertaining to one’s own image and also in its false sense of the adequacy and sufficiency of the self (Birns 2010, p 140).
To Mateer, only his own image in the mirror – and what he can see from this – seems important. This is understandable, because the poet’s aim is to rebuild the self. However, given that writing is an act of communication, this, in Birns’ words, can neither be adequate nor sufficient. This may explain why Alex Miller, in addressing similar issues of colonialism, migrancy and the relationship between Aboriginal and Anglo-Australians, encounters less anger and resentment than Mateer. With Miller, communication – however difficult and fraught – is always the aim, while Mateer’s quest is for self-understanding, not necessarily connection. Mateer does try to use his mirroring as a way of connecting across difference, but for this he uses Aboriginal stories. There are two narratives that continually attract the poet’s attention. Both are significant within the Noongar community, the original owners of the area that is now Perth (Mateer’s adopted home-town). The first is his ‘conversation’ with the already mentioned Yagan, a Noongar warrior who was killed by settlers in 1833. After the murder, he was decapitated and the head sent to London, where it was displayed as a curiosity. Subsequently, the head languished in storage for over a century, before it was buried in an unmarked grave. When Noongar groups started to lobby for the repatriation of Yagan’s head, a search was mounted and eventually it was found in 1993. Because Noongar elders were divided, and an application for exhumation was rejected, a ‘Yagan Steering Committee’ was formed. Eventually, after years of political lobbying, the head arrived in Australia in 1997 (Fforde et al 2002, p 236). Since then the where and when of the re-burial has been a matter of contention between Noongar elders, and so far Yagan’s head still remains above ground. A statue of Yagan, erected in 1997, was beheaded twice and non- indigenous groups have been asking the council to cover up his genitals (ibid). 207
Needless to say, the whole saga was, and to a certain extent still is, a political hot potato. The second narrative that Mateer uses, relates to the site of the Swan Brewery in Perth, which is “a landscape of significance to both European and indigenous histories and memories” (Lewi 2005, p 44). For the Noongar, the place on the banks of the river Swan not only has spiritual significance as the resting place of the Waugal water spirit, but some Aboriginal groups are also convinced that a massacre took place there (DET 2010, website). Europeans, on the other hand, claimed that the buildings on the site, built at the start of settlement of the area, should be heritage-listed and conserved. The third player was an entrepreneur, backed by the Liberal Party (then in power), who wanted to turn the area into a hotel, restaurant and a number of luxurious apartments. The issue continued to plague Perth politics from the mid-1980s till 1992, when “the troubled site was given to the private developer” (Lewi 2005, p 54). In the end it took another ten years before they could offer wealthy buyers a “champagne life at the Brewery’, complete with 24-hours concierge and heated swimming pool (ibid). Again, this has been an issue that, like Yagan’s fate, became a battleground between white and black interests. Mateer’s decision to write on either subject was bound to be controversial, because of the cultural sensitivities involved. In Anachronism Mateer starts by narrating two long poems, called ‘Talking with Yagan’s Head’ and ‘The Brewery Site’. Both poems centre on an “I”, who is seeing, talking, thinking. In ‘Talking with Yagan’s Head’, the “I” has walked away from the city, the “sticky bitumen of the parking area”, and is sitting “in a secluded ditch, freed from being my self”. He watches the trees and describes them for himself, finding more and more history, described as “seedlings”. He realises then that “‘In this place you’re talking with Yagan’s head”’ (Mateer 1997, p 73). The protagonist is presented as a “boong, white man as boong/ Kaffir” (1997, p 74), an insider-outsider who is not being listened to. Aside from the rather troubling last sentence, here Mateer is immersed in the self-part of his mirroring project, more than he is concerned with dialogue. The only ‘other’ there is nature, the land: Yagan is merely an occasion for the poet’s voice. In ‘The Brewery Site’, Mateer does something comparable. The “I” is in Perth’s Botanical Gardens this time, and two histories are being juxtaposed: the visible, colonial one, and the sacred, indigenous one, that “won’t be apparent” (1997, p 85). There is no communication between the two; nothing but silence, “an historic unspoken” (ibid). However, soon memories come, 208 from “Drakensberg mountains, from my heart’s creek” (1997, p 86), and after an invocation, “O mother, O mother-Land”, Mateer’s narrator reveals his reason for being there: “walking like an ant I’m searching for my culture / I don’t have a simile for my face here” (ibid). “This land”, he concludes, “won’t be a face, not for me”: he is a “vanishing ‘I’” (1997, p 87). Something has gone wrong with the mirroring: looking in the mirror, there seems to be nothing to see. Then, suddenly changing the tone, Mateer’s protagonist acknowledges the political issue at hand: “protesters flying the land rights flag fighting police”. He continues:
I don’t know how true any of this is I don’t want to speak of a rape I can’t understand I don’t want to be another appearance among many ghosts whose eyes are sewn and whose mouths open to spew yawns (1997, p 87-88).
The speaker goes on: “I wonder if this is a white man’s / madness” (1997, p 88), and views “the sacred place” “as dangerous as a dishonest past” (1997, p 89). Tom Bishop, in Antipodes, declares that “these are among the most effective and subtle political meditations I know of in Australian poetry”. They “offer pregnant models of self-scrutiny for contemporary Australia, as it struggles once more with the roots and branches of its own racist exclusions” (Bishop 2000, p 55). Despite this perceived concern with the political, however, the poem soon returns to the personal, possibly the poet’s own obsession with a self identity: “‘Am I weeping?’” asks Mateer’s speaker, “’Weeping?’/ Only for my self. On this site I am a ghost. I am a voice that’s off his/ head” (Mateer 1997, 89) – the allusion to Yagan foregrounded once again. In this way Mateer’s speaker, perhaps a surrogate for the poet himself, indigenises/Indigenises himself: decapitated, silenced, murdered even, like the Indigenous warrior before him. It is quite a claim, and the question is how far one can go in speaking for, or trying to become the other (let alone the ‘Other’). At such moments Mateer comes dangerously close to using the other to empower the self. In persistently comparing himself/his protagonists with suffering others, whether they are black South Africans, hunted down illegal immigrants or murdered Indigenous people, Mateer is at risk of trivialising that suffering by amplifying his own. This is again not writing as interaction, or even as a way of getting known or heard. Using the murder of an Aboriginal warrior to tell the reader that you feel ‘murdered’ yourself invokes the criticism vocalised earlier by Simoes da Silva, that “self-writing” in this 209
way has less to do with telling about yourself but more with “[attempting] to negotiate […] [your] invisibility” (Simoes da Silva 2005, p 472) or even taking back power and control. Loanwords (2002) has yet another invocation of Yagan, and this time Mateer chooses to address the warrior. He is inspired to do that, he says, by the African tradition of orality and invocation. Introducing every separate part of the poem in two languages: English and Yagan’s Noongar, this is clearly an element of his mirroring: learning, language acquisition, localised language. While using somebody else’s language can be a sign of making an effort, of trying to understand, it can also be seen as an intrusion, an attempt to become part of a culture and a community that is not yours. Once more, Mateer’s two strands are present: the start of a discussion about colonisation, and an investigation of the writer’s own position, sometimes even in the same sentence: “your buried head brought out into Westralian glare / enabled an alien to hymn you in nineteen ninety-nine” (Mateer 2002, p 73). The “I” has been substituted with “this poet”, “he who is recording these words”, “he who is writing this sentence” (2002, p 74), and is very visible. This alienation effect suggests greater possibilities for dialogue with the other and with history. Lyn McCredden recognises the two strands of the mirroring, and asserts that Mateer’s address to Yagan in Loanwords is “an outsider’s languaged exploration of the symbolic and historical reality of the past for the present”. She even calls it “an eloquently imagined ‘Sorry’ from the present to the past”, and compliments Mateer by declaring that “the poet’s meditation on the continuing complex impact of colonisation, of the past on the present, is impressive” (McCredden 2002, p 7). Still, the impression becomes even stronger that in fact here is someone asking for, or maybe even claiming Indigeneity. ‘He’ is trying to write himself into the country, but does that by using somebody else’s story. Furthermore, the questions are not questions about the country, or historicity, or even Aborigines or Yagan, but about the position of the self. Where do I fit, what am I saying, and “What am I doing here, on my knees, before a brown severed head?” (2002, p 77).
In Kim Scott’s Kayang and Me, the Noongar writer is very clear about his objections to Mateer’s poetry, in particular ‘In the Presence of a Severed Head’. As he explains, there are three main reasons why he felt so “perturbed” when he heard Mateer read his poem out loud at the public reading in Fremantle. The first thing that 210
“mortified” him was the line “Yagan, even you were re-incarnated – a white man! – once” (Scott 2005, p 229). He goes on to explain that some Noongar people in the past would call the colonists djanga, “the spirits of returned ancestors”: “not quite human”, “Spirit creatures. Devils maybe”. This, Scott says, “probably stems from the belief that any life form must inevitably be in some way a manifestation of the land’s spirit”, but “it’s also an idea which was – and is – used to rationalise non-Indigenous occupation, and which often gets confused with reincarnation” (2005, p 230). Scott writes that he finds “it difficult to explain why [he] felt so terrible”, “although the perpetuation of that very convenient notion of reincarnation was definitely one reason” (ibid). Another was “that there are very few forums for Noongar people to come to terms with the ideas of their ancestors and how they are represented in the archives, and so it can feel doubly wrong when relatively recent arrivals use those representations for their own purposes” (ibid). Although Scott is actually very kind to Mateer, in saying that the text is “in many ways” a “fine poem”, and “probably intended as a kind of homage and a way of engaging with Western Australian colonial history” (2005, p 229), he views the effort as characterised by self interest. Scott is especially disenchanted when Mateer uses Noongar language, a language, on the verge of extinction, that, Scott feels, “must first be consolidated and rejuvenated in its home community before it is disseminated further” (2005, p 230-231). Concluding, Scott asserts that the does not think “it helps any Noongar to hear a stranger using our ancestors’ language badly when that language is still not available to so many of us” (2005, p 231). Writing about the episode and Scott’s response, Mateer presumed that the Aboriginal author was condemning him because he was white and a migrant. However, Scott never talks about colour at all when referring to Mateer. His objection is not that Mateer is white, but that Mateer has not been in the country long enough to understand the intricacies of its (colonial) discourse. It is Mateer’s migrant status that is the problem here, not his colour. But because for Mateer these two issues are intertwined, he cannot see the distinction being made.
The last time Mateer revisits Aboriginal issues is in The Ancient Capital of Images (2005). In a section called ‘Nyoongar Country’, Mateer seems to conclude years writing about Australia: nobody is interested in him, nobody wants to listen to what he has got to say, he seems to have nothing to offer. The first poem in the cycle again locates the narrator: “I’m not a local […]. For some time I stand there 211 wondering what to say” (Mateer 2005, p 24). The second one is ‘The Novelist’s Comments’, the poem written about Mateer’s altercation with Kim Scott. Its last sentence reads: “So that the white bastards wouldn’t get that too” (2005, p 25). The next two poems talk about the narrator’s disassociation from the land of Australia itself: nature, “abuzz with disorientated spirits” (2005, p 26), and the suburbs, the scene of arson and violence (2005, p 27): it is a sad conclusion, this apparently overwhelming feeling of having been ousted, expressing a feeling of not belonging now or ever, of exclusion. In a way the mirroring has worked. It has given Mateer a clearer view of his self as a perpetual outsider. What it has not done, though, is open up the lines of communication. Kerry Leves, in Overland, allows that “Mateer’s South African growing-up seems to have enabled sensitivity to Australian ‘racedness’; evident in a moving and informative sequence dedicated to Yagan, an Indigenous man who resisted European settlement” (Leves 2003, p 89). One of the few critics who contextualises Mateer’s self-discovery project, is South African Peter Van Der Merwe. ‘Nyoongar Country’, he claims, shows the poet’s “concern with a relation to indigeneity, exploring if and how it is possible for the white immigrant poet to relate both to his ‘home’ landscape around Perth, and to the autochthonous people of the region, whilst acknowledging that he is not one of them” (Van Der Merwe 2006, p 200). Michael Heald, in his extensive essay on Mateer, elaborates on that and even argues that “‘talking with Yagan’s head’ can be fruitfully seen as a defining predicament for the poetry of John Mateer” (Heald 2000, p 387). Focussing on the poem in Barefoot Speech, but making it the rule for most of Mateer’s writing, Heald insists that “the speaker seems virtually [to] be saying that his efforts to pay careful attention to the native trees and to articulate a response to them, and more generally to become more at home in the natural surroundings, are futile: that it’s like talking to yourself or to the proverbial brick wall” (ibid). Mateer’s aims, according to Heald, are to obtain “a public, or ‘civic’ voice”, “to resist and transform the world-view and language of the oppressor and mutilator; to be ‘put back together’ in a bodily and spiritual sense; to achieve a public hearing which makes a difference; to restore a comprehensive historical perspective”. This “nexus of aspiration and frustration” is at the base of Mateer’s work, Heald says, and is symbolised in the “act of ‘talking with Yagan’s head’” (2000, p 388). There is a “pervasive and often mutilating sense of disorientation” in the writing, and a “very strong desire to mean and be heard, but also an acute 212 consciousness that a satisfactory listening, one which will not reduce experience in order to commandeer it for ideological purposes, may not be present” (2000, p 389- 390). I presume the reason it is difficult for Australians to consider Mateer’s position as a migrant is that the poet is engaged with two conflicting projects at the same time. When the quest for self is more or less disguised as a political discussion about historicity and colonialism, it is understandable that an audience may only hear one of these strands. Also, to read this type of poetry without incorporating the probably traumatic and certainly problematic background of the writer, compounds the difficulty and therefore Mateer’s frustration. Given this frustration, it is entirely understandable that Mateer’s current writing is focussed on the world outside Australia. Although I would contend that by concentrating on Fernando Pessoa and Portugal, as he does in the HEAT essay and his 2007 collection Southern Barbarians, the old twin-project of discussing colonialism and self (and belonging), has not changed. Fernando Pessoa’s biography gives one of the first pointers to why John Mateer feels so connected to him. Pessoa was born in 1888, in Lisbon, Portugal. After his father died when he was five years old, his mother remarried the Portuguese consul to Durban, South Africa, and the family moved there. The young Fernando attended an English school, before going back to Portugal at age seventeen. Soon he started to write: criticism in 1912, creative prose in 1913 and finally poetry in 1914. One of the interesting things about Pessoa was that he had multiple writing alter egos he called ‘heteronymns’. They were people, usually males, who wrote in a different style and had completely separate biographies, made up by their ‘inventor’. When Pessoa died in 1935, most of his writings were unpublished, but he left a trunk with 27.543 manuscripts, written by 86 ‘different’ poets (Zenith 1998, p 1-3). Richard Zenith, one of the world’s experts on Pessoa, calls the poet “a fragmented soul” (1998, p 35) and asserts that “Not even his own self belonged to him. He was so resolutely a spectator of his intimate person that he felt it as something completely extraneous” (1998, p 7). Zenith also claims that “the heteronymic conceit accentuated and in a certain way justified Pessoa’s condition of self-estrangement. Each heteronymn was a fresh personification of his abdication from being” (ibid). The reason for this, Eugénio Lisboa contends, is that Pessoa “is the archetype of the alien, the ‘foreigner’. He spent his first six years in Lisbon and was then ‘exiled’ to Durban; the return to Lisbon, alone, aged seventeen, was a second exile”. “In a way, in a deep 213
and painful way”, Lisboa stresses, “Fernando Pessoa acted systematically as the amazed discoverer of realities to which he did not belong” (Lisboa 1997 (1995), p xiii). Octavio Paz also sees Pessoa as “an empty man who, in his helplessness, creates a world in order to discover his true identity. All Pessoa’s work is a search for the lost identity” (1997 (1995), p 18). There are fascinating similarities between Pessoa and Mateer here: the migrant experience (that has been forced upon them), South Africa as an important influence, the use of language and poetry to find a sense of belonging and a self. There are notable differences as well: Pessoa, with the help of his heteronymns, seems to have succeeded in obtaining a certain degree of detachment and acceptance, where I would contend that this is something Mateer aims for but does not achieve – although he may yet succeed in doing so. Pessoa gives Mateer someone to belong to, a club of ‘non-belongers’, of outsiders. Together with another Portuguese poet, Luís de Camões, Mateer sees himself linked in
a trinity of the European poets of the Foreign. If Camoes, the author of the founding epic Os Lusiadas, could be seen as a figure like God, and if Pessoa, vulnerable and hyper-self-conscious, might be the sacrificed son, our Christ, then might I not be protean, diffuse and unavoidable: the Holy Spirit of Elsewhere’ (Mateer 2007, p 109).
Interesting here, I find, is Mateer’s association with a colonial nation that had, especially during the colonial war that dictator António Salazar fought in the African colonies between 1961 and 1974, a reputation for violent suppression of countries looking for freedom and self-determination. Mateer’s choice of Luís de Camões as the God in his trinity is remarkable in that respect as well. De Camões spent most of his life in the Portuguese army, fighting in countries that would become Portuguese colonies. This is also where he wrote his famous ‘Os Lusíadas’, a poem that celebrates Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India and Portugal’s “historic mission” to “open up new worlds” (1964, p 23). It is, in Mateer’s words, an “epic colonial text” (Mateer 2007, p 109), and he is in the process of writing an answer to the poem, in which he expects
to find moments in which even that epochal text reveals a necessary openness to experience, an unintentional propensity for the dissolution of self that the reader may use to evoke his own sense of what the ‘foreignness’ of the 214
Portuguese encounters with the natives must have actually been like (2007, p 109-110).
“What exactly I will be like in that poem remains to be seen”, Mateer reasons, a sentence in which, again, the twin-projects of colonialism and self intertwine. To Mateer, the focus on Portugal and its colonialism, turns him from the “post-colonial subject I thought I was”, “the stranger poet in a stranger empire”, into part of his imaginary literary trinity (2007, p 108). It is a compelling and confusing play with identities, which almost locates this particular migrant writer as outside of every known universe – not so much hybrid as ‘in the middle of nowhere’. Indeed, he appears to be part of “the holy spirit of elsewhere”. Mateer’s 2007 collection Southern Barbarians is his literary investigation into his Portuguese connections. The title, taken from the name “given to the first Portuguese traders and missionaries encountered by the Japanese” (2007, p 109), carries an echo to JM Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). This and the “southern”, suggests Mateer is seeking a vehicle through which to continue working out his South African and Australian identities without becoming mired in contemporary politics. Southern Barbarians starts with one of Pessoa’s lines “I write to forget”, part of his Book of Disquiet, where this particular paragraph begins with “Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life” (Pessoa 2003, p 108). Soon Mateer positions Pessoa in relation to himself: “You are my Self captured in this photograph/ and I am your sole-surviving heteronymn” (Mateer 2007, p 17), and “My childhood paralleled his” (2007, p 35). Once more Mateer’s narrator goes looking for identity: his identity, other identities. Walking through the streets of Lisbon, he wonders why he is crying, and the answer is devastating:
When I cross paths with the three old women bundled in their black They don’t murmur Bom dia. To them I am less than the dead Not even a curator of remains, not even a ghost-writer – a tourist. I am sick of this. I can’t stop weeping (2007, p 21).
There are constant “double-takes”, where he has to remind himself:
And I, too, have paused in double-take, same as these two African gentlemen in slightly baggy suits who now, 215
on seeing the effigy of the exotic bird, have also around them the savannah that has been deserted by our eyes (2007, p 25).
The conclusion is as confusing as it is clear: “Where am I? or, being the poet, Who am I?” (2007, p 28). ‘After Returning From A Voyage of Exploration’ ends with “the dream/ that one day there will be a poet/ named John Mateer, just as there was once,/ off the edge of maps, a monster/ called Australia” (2007, p 31). The only hope is that “there remains another place”: “the Empire of Nostalgia” (2007, p 49), and here, in Portugal, at least he finds its soundtrack in “saudade” (ibid). Southern Barbarians reads as another quest, with another dead end. The judgement is in: once you leave, you’re lost. Never will there be an identity, a self, a belonging anywhere. Kris Hemensley – now a bookseller in Melbourne, who migrated to Australia from Britain (and, briefly, Egypt) to Australia in 1966, and was the poetry editor for Meanjin in the 1970s – reviewed the book on his blog. Hemensley refers to the migrancy the critic and the poet have in common: “We’ve talked about this as some kind of actual basis for an outsiderness we may share as poets in Australia” (Hemensley 2008, p 1), he says, and uses his personal knowledge of a background like that throughout his critique. First, Hemensley goes back to the poem in The Ancient Capital of Images, where Mateer’s narrator presses his fist against the fist of a black poet. He calls this “the white poet’s mea culpa” and even claims that “political guilt has become pathology” (Hemensley 2008, p 2): “this colour consciousness, so candidly expressed, is the failure of person that distorted logic always produces. […] Self-excoriation is not humility” (ibid). It is a harsh verdict, but Hemensley points out that in Southern Barbarians “John Mateer is the author […] even as he is one of its characters”. According to Hemensley, Mateer is engaging in a “serious and lyrical interrogation of the first person” (2008, p 3). He seems “doomed to wandering”, in his search for the right words that will describe “history and politics”. Nevertheless, it “irks” Hemensley that Mateer’s “wandering” always comes back to “the first person”, “problematizing” it, and at the same time “let[ting] it off the hook” (ibid). In the second review, which doubles up as the launching speech for Elsewhere, Hemensley again argues that Mateer’s core quest is into “the identity questions which assuredly course their author’s being” (2008, p 1-2). Once more he raises the issue of Mateer’s heritage and migration and says that “these matters of identity are conduits of revelation: of the conventional personal type and of the person-as-body-of-the 216 political” (2008, p 2). He describes Mateer as “riven – his heart aches”, and “at this level of pain he doubts the efficacy of communicable language”. In the end Mateer always ends up “the Stranger, the stranger on the earth, stranger to society” (2008, p 3-4). This, I would say, is a direct consequence of Mateer’s “problematizing” of “the first person”: never able to look beyond the self, “communicable language” has not been possible. In his review of The Ancient Capital of Images, Nicholas Birns offers a possible answer to some of these questions. Birns views John Mateer as “a poet of the Global South”, a writer with a “sense of an unusual cosmopolitanism centered in the South”. Mateer, he writes, is “one of the few voices to posit Australia […] as part of the world below the Equator”. An “outsider”, yes, but still an “internationalist”, with a “South-oriented vision” (Birns 2005, p 95-96). Globalisation and cosmopolitanism are the buzz-words in contemporary intellectual and cultural debates, so I understand why Birns brings up this option for Mateer. The idea seems to be that for writers living outside of their locality, cosmopolitanism is the way forward. However, for John Mateer, I think the words of Edward Said are still very much valid. In Reflections on Exile, Said insisted that exile creates “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (Said 1990, p 357). Mateer is not comfortably locally grounded, his position as a migrant in Australia is fraught with difficulties both from his and from the Australian perspective, and therefore there is no real freedom of choice here. Although I think that Mateer would love to be Birns’ “poet of the Global South”, he can neither be global nor “of the South”. “The South”, in Mateer’s case, stands for both Australia and South Africa, and he has problems with and within both. As Mateer said during our interview: “Water doesn’t flow up hill. I don’t write about Australia anymore, to tell you the truth. I want to be done with it” (ibid). In a way, he is: Elsewhere talks about almost every continent in the world, except Australia. But in the end the conclusion is that Mateer does not possess the broader voice that is associated with globalism at all. On the contrary, he seems to have lost, at least in his own mind, most of his voice. Where the true global poet should be someone from ‘everywhere’, Mateer has made it very clear that he is increasingly, and still, from Elsewhere. And that is an unsettling position to be in.
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CHAPTER 8
CONCLUSION
This might be a broad statement, but I would say that Barack Obama, mass migration and the Global Financial Crisis are changing the world right now – and not just the world, but the old binaries and even the language we use to describe them. President Obama himself seems a great example of how complex descriptions and labels have become. Raised in Hawaii and Indonesia as the son of a black African father and a white American mother, “through Barack Hussein Obama run culture lines that connect Kenya with Kansas; ethnically complicated Polynesian-Asian Hawaii with black south Chicago; Scots-Irish bloodlines with a touch of Cherokee on his maternal grandmother’s side” (Schama 2010, p 175). In Obama, Simon Schama claims, the “ethnic game” is “scrambled”, which has made him “ultimately impervious to the obligations of race-identity politics” (2010, p 180). In addition to this, and maybe even more remarkable, Americans have decided to elect not “the decorated Vietnam prisoner of war with the hero’s story”, but a “lanky” “intellectual” (2010, p 176) with a completely different narrative, language and voice. According to Schama, Obama is “hoping to make a new American fabric of speech” (2010, p 79), “tuning in to [differently coloured] promptings of history: ‘I hear you, Abe, I hear you, Martin; message coming in loud and clear’” (2010, p 172). “Uniquely qualified to braid together the two great strands of national rhetoric” (2010, p 79), Barack Obama has become “an interlocutor, discovering that without compromising his own history he can disarm paranoia and make people of opposite minds and backgrounds listen to each other” (2010, p 184). 218
It might be that Schama is a little optimistic about Obama’s powers of persuasion and his ability to cross heavily engrained (racial) divides, but I agree with the historian that the American President has changed the language of difference and the perception of who can speak that language. It is a case that is also made by Zadie Smith (herself a product of a history of mass migration), who juxtaposes Obama with Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, the “tragic story” of “an awkward in-between thing, […] with one voice lost and another gained at the steep price of everything she was, and everything she knows” (Smith 2009, p 3). Eliza, Smith asserts, has to make a choice: “one voice must be sacrificed for the other. What is double must be made singular” (2009, p 4). On the other hand, Obama’s narrative is “not the tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural” (2009, p 5). In living this, Smith contends, he “doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them” (2009, p 4), because “most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives” (2009, p 6). As Nicholas Birns writes, Obama’s election has not “solved conclusively all issues of racial discrimination” at all, but it has “[jump-started] discourses of cultural plurality” (Birns 2010, p 218). Birns even signals Obama’s list of favourite books – including both Toni Morrison and Shakespeare – as a “truce in the culture wars” (2010, p 215). It would be easy to view Obama in the context of the now clichéd postcolonial concept of hybridity. However, I do not think that Schama, Smith or Birns are talking about hybridity in the postcolonial sense at all. Their focus seems to be more on individual plurality and choice than on an individual’s attempt to unite – and maybe even homogenize – his or her disparate ‘sides’. The Obama story is not about consolidating or emptying out, but about filling up and stretching out a person’s options and possibilities. It is also, I think, not only a tale of colour or race, but one that is recognisable to many people in the world who combine heritages and identities. Furthermore, as Birns warns, what should be avoided is to view hybridity as just “another consensus”, “a safer mode of political reconciliation or moderation”: “it should not be a unitary credo” (2010, p 213). Hybridity, “[hailed] as beneficial” in postcolonial studies, is at risk of becoming a “prescriptive [slogan] that merely [describes] a certain aspect of the status quo and no longer [pertains] to actual states of feeling or being or thinking” (2010, p 317-8). 219
The example of Obama underwrites one of the points this thesis has tried to make. In a world of “changing voices” (Smith 2009, p 2), the old binaries have become not only difficult, but almost impossible to maintain. Looking at somebody and categorizing them as different from the core because of what you think you can see, is now no longer a viable option. In Australia, for example, the core is still largely delineated as white Anglo-Celtic and the non-core as ethnic and visibly different. Unfortunately, as I have showed in chapters 1 and 2, none of these words has a singular meaning that can be safely deployed. Furthermore, the simple fact that there are groups who disturb the core/non-core binary (white [English-speaking] migrants, non-white Australian-born‘ethnics’) makes contrasting core and non-core as two distinctly separate entities rather impractical. Also, visibly different is not necessarily different, while what looks like part of the core can be very different indeed. On the other hand, the problem is not solved by just turning all groups and individuals into one big melting pot, one hybrid “status quo”, discounting and dispensing with the internal distinctions. As Birns writes, the risk of doing this is that this turns into a disregard of “actual states of feeling or being or thinking”. It is as dangerous, I would argue, as the current tendency in Australian literary criticism to bring together all literature written in or about Australia under the same banner, ready for its unitary export abroad. As Birns stresses: “Global literary approaches tended to lose sight of the historically specific relation of modern colonialism that post-colonial had” (Birns 2010, p 253), and that is, I would suggest, only one problem. Unique voices will inevitably be lost as well, because they cannot be heard for what they are: different.
It can be said that the writers investigated in this thesis suffer from the consequences of both the binaries and the present need to do away with them by submerging them. Their categorisation as part of the core has made their stories of difference difficult to tell and even harder to hear. A close reading of the work of New Zealand-Australian writer Ruth Park, for instance, reveals a treasure trove of what I delineate as migrant writing in chapter 1: literature about, and influenced by, the migrant experience. From The Harp in the South to Swords and Crowns and Rings, Park has always written about migrants and other outsiders, investigating issues that are particularly salient for these groups. Looking at the Irish, she describes them as both part of Australia and yet very much separate from the Anglo core. In the course of Park’s life and authorship, she becomes less and less optimistic about the 220 possibility of their belonging and even seems to portray Irish-Australians as lost in many ways. Their (sense of) community undermined, burdened with a riven identity, they also pay the ‘practical’ price of displacement: poverty and generational conflicts. Park’s non-English speaking migrants are positioned as even more forlorn, without any hope of ever dissolving the “black and antique seal of their ancestry” (Park 1948, p 115). For all these groups there seems only one goal, indigeneity, although Park’s description of Aboriginals is that while they are at home and do have an ‘undamaged’ identity, they are not accepted as belonging in Australia either. Despite Park’s migrant themes and preoccupations, her reviewers neither acknowledge them or the connection between Park’s subject matter and her status as a migrant. Instead, at the time of her death, Park was described as an unproblematically Australian writer, telling “our” story. This analysis of her work obscures the view of both the writer and the tales of difference she has got to tell. Most of the critical assessments of Park’s novels also fail to notice this writer’s effort at what Jane Warren calls “wogspeak” (Warren 1999, p 86), and what I would like to describe as a specific version of Obama’s multivocality. Park not only conveys in her work who people are, but also what they sound like, and those accents communicate one thing above all: difference. The Chinese, Dutch, Germans and even the Irish portray their non-belonging, their outsidership, by the language they use, and Park even makes up new words and word combinations to leave the reader in no doubt that this is what is going on. Park’s characters grapple with the new language, blend it with the old one and come up with something fresh, something that gives them the opportunity to tell the story of their “plural selves” and “different strands”. British-Australian writer Alex Miller does something similar in his work, although he goes about it in quite a different way. Where Park tries to make difference apparent in the language, Miller forces the reader to do some work. Names like Kabara (‘home’) and Lang Tzu (‘the son who goes away’) are pointers to the importance of migrant identity and dislocation, hidden and yet there under the surface, waiting for a reader with a clear eye. Prochownik’s Dream gives another example of the significance of a name, with Miller giving Toni the choice between his Australian name Powlett (signalling belonging in the new land) and his family name Prochownik (which gives him a ‘true’ identity, but puts him outside of the core at the same time). And then there is Australia, “a land imagined”, “not a real place” (Miller 1992, p 259). All of this not only points to Miller’s authorial preoccupation with the choice 221
between identity and belonging (for the migrant), but also signals his fascination with the role of language and stories within this dilemma. Miller believes that we “hide our truth”, and that “it’s not in what we say but in what we leave unsaid that we reveal the shape of our deepest motives” (Miller 2003 [1995], p 15-16). However, the writer realises that language is the only tool he has at his disposal to communicate, however fragmented, plural and inadequate this might be. It is also, in Miller’s work, a possible solution to dislocation, a way to literally write yourself into a new world. Like Obama, Miller values history and memory as an important way to understand “the story of the intimate and private lives of us” (Miller 2006, p 6-7), while at the same time distrusting nostalgia for its capacity of making the past look like paradise and locating the present as less-than. Miller’s body of work is also very much concerned with landscapes, borders, boundaries, crossings and frontiers, in a bid to understand psychological and physical (non-)belonging. From The Tivington Nott to Lovesong, Miller’s populates his novels with “strangers” (Miller 2009, almost every page) looking for position, preferably without losing too much; struggling to “find [their] place” (Miller 1992, p 194). He compares white and Aboriginal belonging, migrant and non-migrant belonging, male and female belonging, telling Obama’s “multiple narratives” to find out what Australia’s “cultural plurality” means for the people living it. Again, despite this, it has been Miller’s position as a “non-migrant Australian writer” (Lever 1998, p 325) that has obscured the views on some of the work. Alex Miller is a migrant writer and it is this lived experience that informs his novels more than anything else. As Miller says himself: “Even if you don’t want to see it, it is still there” (Miller 2008 interview, 5 June). One of the main differences between Park and Miller on the one hand and South African-Australian writer John Mateer on the other, is that where the first two use language to try to communicate and connect with their reader, the last mainly seems to employ it in a desperate quest for self-understanding and belonging. Throughout the course of his poetic career, Mateer becomes more and more unable to find the words that will alleviate his dislocation. In 1997, one of Mateer’s narrators concludes that he is “a slaughter of voices” (Mateer 1997, p 11). Three years later this has turned into the statement that “I have no speaking voice” (Mateer 2000, p 56), while in Loanwords (2002) the proclamation is that “all voice is failure” (Mateer 2002, p 50). This perceived lack of power and ability to speak also has consequences 222
for the identity of Mateer’s narrators and the poet himself. The question “What language do I have?” is almost necessarily followed by another: “Am I ‘human’?” (Mateer 2008 interview, 8 June). Instead of trying to find new and possibly better ways of communication, Mateer’s response to his cultural schizophrenia is to go on the attack. First by refusing more and more words to his readers, especially those that have an Afrikaans heritage, substituting them with silence. In addition to this, he starts criticising white Australia’s “repressed xenophobia” (Mateer 2007, p 104), while on the other hand trying to indigenise himself by using Aboriginal stories and comparing himself to silenced and decapitated Noongar heroes. Obviously, this does not endear him to either his critics or his readers, or give him the so longed-for belonging. It also does nothing to convey enough to his reviewers to make them understand his particular in- between position as a white, South African migrant writer in a country that looks and sounds the same, but is not.
What can be concluded, then, from the investigation into the work and reception of these white, English-speaking migrant writers, is, firstly, that the quintessential migrant themes of dislocation and fragmentation, landscape and history and home and belonging are all very much present here. Moreover, the issue of language and the question of how to communicate difference is also at the forefront of each of the writers’ work. Additionally, where the writers have been positioned as part of the core (Park and Miller in particular), the migrant content has been overlooked; where their migrant difference has obtruded (early Park and Mateer), critics have refused them entry to the core. Where this refusal has become the very content of the writing (Mateer), the migrant either attempts to override the construction of difference or subsides into an aesthetic and experiental alienation figured as the global wanderer. As I have argued in chapter 4, incorporating a writer’s biography, despite its pitfalls, is important. It might be valuable to list those pitfalls here. Firstly, biographical criticism as ‘literary gossip’ can detract from our reading of the text. Secondly, for migrant writing, biographical reading might be seen to lend weight to the pejorative discounting of artistic shaping in recounting migrant experience. Thirdly, it might appear to buy into ideas of intent, invoking objections around Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘Intentional Fallacy’. However, intent is not implied in 223
reading a text back onto an author’s experience. Also, migrant writing is generally defined as resting on contextual experience. My idea here is that bringing all migrant writers into the frame of migrant writing shows how migrancy (properly multicultural) is central, not peripheral to Australian literature. Furthermore, a text- central reading limits the range of interpretation, so migrancy can be occluded; a biographically aware reading corrects this. Lastly, my call is not to return to the biographical ‘literary gossip’ approach, but to throw added light on the problematic of migrant identity. “As a novelist”, Alex Miller writes in his preface for the 2005 edition of The Tivington Nott,
I have been not so much a liar as a re-arranger of facts. That is the kind of writer I am. The purely imaginary has never interested me as much as the actualities of our daily lives, and it is of these that I have written. Although this story may not be autobiography in the conventional sense, it is nevertheless deeply self-revealing of its author (Miller 2005, p vii-viii).
A few years later, during a public interview at the 2008 Mildura Writers’ Festival, he reiterates this point when a member of the audience confronts him with the often- asked question: ‘Where does your writing come from?’ Miller answers that he never invents anything, only writes about people and places he knows and loves, that it all starts with “a conversation with the subconscious” (Miller July 2008), and that its purpose is to “save” the writer’s “soul” (ibid). Following this statement, he then adds that, “of course”, “a lot of fabricating” goes on as well, and that “literalism is the enemy of art” (ibid). A few weeks after the festival, I came across another writer, American Michael Chabon, who was also trying to explain the mysterious relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘lying’ in literature, as well as understanding the role of biographical ‘facts’ in all of this:
It is along the knife-narrow borderland between those two kingdoms, between the Empire of Lies and the Republic of Truth, more than along any other frontier on the map of existence, that Trickster [the writer] makes his wandering way, and either comes to grief or finds his supper, his treasure, his fate (Chabon 2008, p 210).
If Miller and Chabon are right, then attaining a full reading of a text requires 224
that the reader ventures into this “borderland”, that she does her best to read the writer’s “map of existence”, in order to find the “treasure” that is there. To both Miller and Chabon, telling the “truth”, or at least “a truth” (ibid), is what makes literature come alive. “If a writer doesn’t give away secrets”, Chabon argues, “his own or those of the people he loves [...], the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth” (2008, p 155). It seems to me that for both Miller and Chabon the origin of “truth”, or “a truth”, might be found in, amongst other things, the experiences that led to their “understanding” of “life”. For the reader to undertake the journey into the “borderland”, then, implies taking these experiences into account, because they are, in a way, the keys, the legends, to the “map” – not merely of the writer’s experience but also of the national literary construction of its collective experience. Failing to do so can only result in a partial reading of the text, like reading a map without the legend can lead to getting lost, or at least missing a vital turn-off. This thesis tracks the frontier where “a truth” turns into literature: it follows the writer’s mind, prompted by experiences, his place in the world, in history, guided by the words he feels he can use to “re-arrange the facts” without falling into “literalism”. It has led me to advocate the re-introduction of biographical readings as an important additional tool to understanding a text, and investigate the difficulties that can arise from the miscommunication between critics and writers if biography is overlooked or misunderstood. My aim has been to show that, although there are obvious differences between Miller, Park and Mateer, their reception has similarly suffered from a new critical/modernist map-reading that refuses extratextual legends. As a result, they have not been adequately positioned in Australian literary history. Moreover, this has resulted from a blindness to their personal and creative involvement with migrant experience, founded upon the dominant binary constructions of migrancy and multiculturalism in Australia. Many, if not all, of these critical assumptions made were based on the Australian interpretation of the word – and the person – of the migrant. In Australian parlance and understanding, a migrant has to be sufficiently, and visibly, different to be placed in this category. The connection between the act of migrancy and the ‘status’ of migrant has been abandoned, and replaced by normative typologies that tend to describe the migrant as somehow peripheral to, and ‘less than’ the ‘core’. Therefore, someone who looks and sounds like the core, cannot, according to this logic, be something other than part of the core. This thesis has shown that the binary 225 sets up a problem for two particular groups of writers. On the one hand there are the writers who are presumed, because they look (and sound) different from the core, to write about difference and their personal experience with the consequences of this difference. Theirs is a straightjacket that often robs them of the opportunity for gaining recognition for writing about anything else. Thankfully other literary theorists, notably Jessica Raschke, in her thesis on what she calls the “ethnic bandwagon” (Raschke 2005, see chapter 3), have addressed this issue in some detail. Correcting the limiting placement and reception of the migrant writer, however, does not of itself critique the normative definition of ‘migrant’; nor does it help those who are excluded from that definition, although their life experience and literary themes may be quite similar. This thesis, then, attends to white, English-speaking, ‘culturally similar’ migrant writers, who do in fact write about difference, but whose subject matter is overlooked because they are supposed to be part of the non-different ‘core’. I would suggest that if difference as it has been deployed works to disadvantage ‘ethnics’ and hide some migrants while perpetuating a tacit white Anglo normativity, then my project of rendering visibility (and in some ways also ‘ethnicity’) to the white migrant is not a ‘me too’ takeover bid on ‘ethnic’ writing, but a further step in the dismantling of a functionally exclusionist normative white Anglo model of Australian culture.
An additional issue in the definition of both core and non-core – and therefore decisions about who belongs in either categories – is multiculturalism. As I have explained in chapter 2, this concept has many varied and conflicting meanings. Especially now, in an age of mass migration and recently influenced by the GFC and political turmoil in Africa and the Middle East, this model has distinctly different connotations in different parts of the world. In Europe, for instance, multiculturalism has come under great pressure, especially from the early 2000s. Most countries in the region have had so-called ‘guestworkers’, especially from North-Africa and Eurasia, since the 1970s. For at least 25 years, the tacit understanding between those migrants and their new governments was that their stay would be temporary: they would make money and then go back home. The rules used to ‘administer’ them came under the heading of multiculturalism, but a very specific version of it, that was connected to their status as a ‘guest’. The idea was that because they were going to leave anyway, it 226
would not be necessary for them to learn the new language or underwrite the cultural principles of Western liberalism. Of course, most migrants got jobs, had children, bought houses and stayed. Although they were no longer guests, most of Europe was slow to realise that this had consequences. A big part of the first generation still did not speak the new language or fully understood their new country’s laws and mores, because they had been given no access to education. Also, with the arrival of a more westernised second generation, generational clashes started to happen. Western values collided with more autocratic principles in many migrant families, and the European countries were for the first time confronted with honour killings, genital mutilations and religious leaders denouncing Western culture and laws from the pulpit. Obviously, only a small percentage of migrants responded like that, but it caught the eye of the media and the public. An additional issue was that Europe’s borders proved more and more porous where it came to refugees, who were forced to flee wars and economic deprivation in their own countries. Demographers began to publish their statistics as well, making clear that, for instance in the UK, white Britons would become the minority in their country within fifty years (Hartwich 2010, p 8). Sometimes they were forgetting to stress, though, that this was not just the result of migration, but had other reasons as well, like the ageing population in Europe. Especially after 9/11, the mood changed in Europe and the concept of multiculturalism became more and more eroded. My own country, Holland, was shocked out of its age-old adage ‘consensus and compromise’ by the 2004 murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh, who had just finished a film critical of the treatment of women under Islam, was knifed and shot in an Amsterdam street by a Moroccan-Dutch Muslim, upset by the criticism of his faith. Van Gogh’s collaborator on the film, Somali-born writer and parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was threatened with the same fate and had to go into hiding. After the public outrage had abated, discussion about the future of multiculturalism almost immediately started. The focus of this debate, as it would be in the rest of Europe, was on the perceived incompatability of Islam with Western liberalism and the supposed failure of migrants to integrate. Of course, this is interesting, because multiculturalism had never asked migrants to do this. In the following years, and especially after the GFC, most countries in Europe turned against multiculturalism. Switzerland banned minarets in 2009 and accepted a 227 law in 2010 that gave Swiss courts the opportunity to automatically deport new citizens, and even second and third-generation migrants who had committed a crime. In a wave of racism and xenophobia, one of the posters used to get the measure through portrayed a white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. France banned the burka and started a mass expulsion of Roma from its territory, while in Germany chancellor Angela Merkel, in a populist bid to stay in power, pronounced that Germany’s attempts at multiculturalism had been an “utter failure” (Paterson 2010, p 1). Merkel’s words were underwritten by an opinion poll at the time, which concluded that more than 30% of Germans thought their country was “overrun by foreigners”, while 55% were of the opinion that Arabs were “unpleasant” (ibid). In February 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron even declared “war on multiculturalism”, stating that “state multiculturalism” was “the root cause of [Musim] radicalisation, which can lead to terrorism”. “We need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years”, he said, adding that if Muslims did not integrate and accept Western values, they would lose government funding for a start (Wright and Taylor 2010, p 1). At the same time that multiculturalism as a concept was dying in Europe, it resumed its decline in Australia. As I stressed in chapter 1 and 2, multiculturalism here has been all but expunged from the official political vernacular. What is interesting, though, is that where Europe’s arguments around the model are related to language and culture/religion, in Australia the concerns seem to be broader, almost with ‘Otherness’ in general. It is not just ‘ethnic minorities’ that invoke fear, but Aboriginals as well. There also appears to be a distinct lack of patience with people like boat refugees, who are perceived to ‘break the rules’, however small – especially in comparison to Europe – their numbers are. Again coming back to the binaries, the conclusion is that Australia seems rather confused about who the ‘Other’ really is. This group appears to comprise migrants, but only if they look ‘ethnic’. It also includes people who are born here, but are visibly different (meaning non-white). And it incorporates Aboriginals, the original inhabitants of the country. So the question, in this post-multicultural society, seems to be: if the nation does not have a clear picture of the Other, how can it have a clear picture of the Self?
Lack of clarity in thinking about migrancy and the multicultural is reflected in the particular broad-based othering in Australia. In the US, Birns claims, writers with 228 a Chinese, Japanese or Korean background “are analysed as ‘Asian American writers’”, while writers with Indian or Bangladeshi descent are “seen as ‘post- colonial’”. Birns also states that
in some countries that were originally English colonies, such as Canada and Australia, a writer of Italian or Jewish descent would be considered an ethnic minority; whereas, in the United States, he or she would not. Philip Roth and Don DeLilo are seen as part of the American mainstream, whereas Nino Ricci or Venero Armanno and A.M. Klein or Judah Waten are or were seen as ‘ethnic’ writers in their home countries (Birns 2010, p 173).
This difference serves to maintain an increasingly small Anglo-Celtic cultural centre in Australia that, as we have seen, obscures one kind of migrant experience in emphasising all others. One of the solutions to this confusion seems to me to be a reintroduction of the strict understanding of ‘migrant writer’, including, obviously, all writers who have migrated, regardless of their visible difference. Everybody else, born in Australia, can then be classified as Australian writers. Also, what I would like to promote here is a close inspection and ultimately the disposal of the core/non-core binary. It is my opinion that these shifts might facilitate proper critical recognition of the full range of the language of difference employed by migrant writers who write migrant literature. Most of all, it would assist all migrant writers to be heard and read for what they are: communicators of difference.
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APPENDIX 1
Unpublished interview with Alex Miller 5 and 6 June 2008, Castlemaine
AM: Exile, displacement, these are the conditions of our age. It is not just me being preoccupied with them, it is what these times are about. Migrants are the norm. You can compare it with the discussion on demographics. At the moment in Australia single person households are the norm. But governments are still pretending that the family is the normal format. The same is true for migrancy. People talk about migrants as the exception, but they are the rule. Q: Can we start at the beginning? AM: I was born and brought up in London, but I couldn’t find the meaning and purpose of my life there. Partly that was due to my parents. My dad came from Glasgow and had a very strong Glaswegian accent and personality. We would sit on the bus and he would say loudly: ‘Don’t take any bullshit from these bastards, Alex!’ It would scare the hell out of all these proper English people with their bowler hats and newspapers. My mum was Irish, so she didn’t fit in either. From a very early age, I realised that I didn’t belong in London. I wasn’t English, not really, and that was made very clear. I wasn’t part of the ruling culture. Q: Your father was not an easy man… AM: No. My father’s problem was that he had been in the army for four years during WWII. He didn’t want to go, but he had the right age, so he was called up. By that time he had three children and I remember him being away a lot. He was in the infantry and saw a lot of action, was involved in very fierce fighting. Not that he talked about that; he never did. But I looked up his war record from the War Department in Britain, so I was able to get the full history of his involvement. I found out what was going on the day he was wounded: all the officers commanding the various platoons were killed, all of them. They were decimated, going up a hill 271 against entrenched Panzer tanks supported by SS troops. They were blasted off the face of the earth and dad was very lucky to be wounded and not killed. Q: You were about eight when that happened. 1944, just before the war ended. Can you remember him coming back? AM: I can even remember him coming home on leave, during the war. He would come home for 48 hours, with his full kit and rifle and everything, stay a day or two and then leave again. A couple of years ago my mother told my wife how I would lie down at the window, looking out, waving to my father until he turned the corner. And then I would cry for the rest of the day and the night and then never mention it again. I hated that part of the war. The rest I thought was great fun. We lived in London during the Blitz, were next to biggest railway martialling yards in the country. They were bombed every day; that was wonderful, exciting. Q: But eventually your dad came home for good, wounded? AM: He was deeply troubled. Because of his wounds he could not work. And when he received his medals he threw them away in disgust. He loathed and hated them and what they stood for. Probably because he did awful things to deserve them. But he did not talk about that either. Never. Q: How did your father’s experiences during the war influence your family life afterwards? AM: My dad would get angry a lot and drink too much. When I wrote, in Landscape of Farewell, the story about how Dougald got beaten up by his father, I never realised that that was a displacement of my own experience. Which is strange, isn’t it? Never realised. After the book came out, we had people over for dinner and we were talking about youth traumas and suddenly it came back to me. It was an afternoon, I think, and my sisters and I had been drawing, but eventually we ended up screwing up the paper and having a paper fight, throwing paper balls at each other. My mother had told us to clean it up, because my dad was coming up the road. My father arriving was always a bit scary, because you never knew what mood he was going to be in, what demands he was going to make. When he came in, I was in the process of cleaning up. My sisters had retreated somewhere, so it was just him and me. When I finished cleaning up, he said: ‘Have you finished?’ The second I answered ‘Yes’, I could see a bit of paper I had missed, just under the skirts of the settee. While he pointed that out to me I was standing very close to him and I could feel his suppressed anger very clearly. For some reason I said nothing and moved even closer to him. ‘I’ll tell you 272
again’, he said. Again I said nothing; I was just standing there, waiting, staring at him. Eventually he whacked me across the face with the back of his hand. I straightened up again and waited for the next one. ‘Now will you pick it up?’ Another slap. And another. Only after I wrote the section in Landscape of Farewell I realised I identified deeply with Dougald. I realised that Dougald invited the beating upon himself, to save the rest of the family from this fierceness and this anger, which the father has every reason to feel and no way of expressing. It was his due and somehow the boy knew he could take it and that he, in a way, owed it to his father. Also, that no real harm would come of it, while if the father would beat up his wife or the girls, it would be a destructive and humiliating thing. I had never even told my wife and we have been together for 35 years. Probably, looking back, because I didn’t want people to think badly of my father. He wasn’t a brutal man; he was a lovely, sensitive man who loved reading, painting, listening to music, going out to the country. A super guy, really, I loved him. And I didn’t want people to misjudge him. But the interesting thing is that while I was writing it, I hadn’t realised that I was writing straight autobiography, from the point of view of the emotion and the dynamics of the situation. Strange, isn’t it? Q: Are you saying that he had a right to do that? His anger had nothing to do with you, yet you bore the brunt of it. AM: I have his name, I am his son. That makes me responsible. After the war ended and I was still in primary school, they sat us all down in the great hall and showed us films made as the Allies entered the concentration camps. We got it virtually without comment and we were frozen, looking at these horrors. That instilled in me a sense of guilt by association. Which, as an unexamined emotion, is just a cliché. But Landscape of Farewell attempts to deal with that. Q: There is something strange, though, in dealing with a parent that has gone through the war. Guilt is one emotion, as you say, but there is also the fact that as a child you take it upon yourself to ‘take care’ of them, protect them. Even if that means taking the beatings. AM: There is this enormous helplessness. There is nothing you can do. You can’t pick somebody up like after they’ve been hit by a car, or something. And still there is this great need to help and connect, one human being to another. Max Blatt once told me that what had been broken in him, after all he had gone through, was the belief in the human project. He had been arrested and taken to Berlin, where he was tortured at 273
the Gestapo headquarters for months. Eventually, of course, he got to know the man who did this to him very well. And he told me how he was lying there, naked, extremely vulnerable, waiting for the next instalment of pain. Suddenly, Max told me, he realised that this man was his brother; that this was a human being too. At that point he began to weep. He had never done that before, so the man asked him if he was ok. You know? That sort of stuff is too surreal to ever write down. But Max said he knew then that he had reached the end. If this is what we do to each other, then it is all over. After I wrote Landscape of Farewell, one of Max’s friends said to me that I had written a book about the belief Max once had, but had lost in that torture chamber. Q: Do you think that your father had lost his belief in the human project as well? AM: I think so. I remember having an argument with my brother once, about taking prisoners during the war. Dad wasn’t part of the discussion, but he was in the room, and halfway through he slammed his paper down and barked: ‘We didn’t take prisoners, you bloody fools’. Then he left the room. I knew then that there was probably a lot he had done he was not particularly proud of. Q: And that is the kind of hurt you are trying to fix as a child, repair the damage? AM: Yes. Q: Is that one of the reasons why you left England? Because of that hopelessness? AM: No-one has ever asked me that. I have asked myself that often. You have to understand the times, though. Even before the war, life was precarious for people like my parents. We lived in a one-room flat and although my dad worked, they often had to scavenge for food. My parents had run away together to get married. They had no back-up, no family, no money, no skills. When I was born, my sister, who was two years old at the time, was sent to ‘a caring home’. My father couldn’t have time off work and my mother was busy having the baby: me. That happened again when my youngest sister was born. This time it was my older sister and me being sent away. The experience of being sent away twice like that destroyed my older sister. It changed her, my mother said, from being a loving, sweet little girl to being this totally remote, closed-off kid. I can understand that now, now I have a small grandchild. If suddenly she would be separated from her mum and dad for two weeks, that, to her, would seem like forever. And to have it happen to you twice, that would leave a scar. It even did with me. I was young, so I can only remember bits of it: being in a car for the first time, with dad there. A woman at the top of some stairs holding open a glass 274
door. My face pressed against green tiles. And hearing myself scream. That is all I’ve got left. I think, though, that that experience, coupled with the weight of the war, made me want to get out. (Bangs the table). ‘I need to get out, I have to get out, I’ve got to get away. There must be somewhere out there…’ As a child I called it ‘following my star’. Somewhere better. What I found in Australia was something unconnected. Unconnected to family, past and history. That gave me a place of my own. Q: ‘Long for something you can’t name and call it Australia. A thing will come into being’, you wrote in The Ancestor Game. AM: Exactly. I have to go somewhere else to get to where I need to go. Q: From a country where history has become so oppressive to a country that seems to have none. AM: Wonderful! Yes, absolutely! From my European perspective Australia looked like this fantastic blank page, free of the ‘too much’ of European history. I freed myself, in a way. Q: But this blankness can easily become a void, something really scary. AM: I remember being on the ship that brought me here. I had so impressed one of the pursers with my longing to go to Australia, that just before we arrived, he woke me up in the middle of the night and brought me to the very front of the ship, where passengers weren’t really allowed. For a minute we did a ‘Titanic’ and he told me to watch out for land and call him when I saw it. The sun was rising and then I saw this thin line. I clearly remember the excitement, the ‘Christ, this is finally it!’ A magical moment. Q: What was that ‘it’? AM: The place that is ready for me, the place I am going to inhabit, the place that will be mine. A clear, clean tabula rasa. Not theirs, not full of stuff, but mine. Ready for me to write on. Q: What happened? AM: Class happened. In England I had always been the boy from the wrong side of the tracks. The wrong accent, the wrong sense of humour; too Irish, too Scottish. Here, because I came in at a working-class level, I found a sense of homeliness. The first person I really met was a truck driver who picked me up just outside of Sydney and brought me all the way to Queensland. I had hitchhiked in England before I left and I can remember this truckie there, who opened the door, looked at me and said: 275
‘Well, well, what have we got here?’ I had to explain myself, tell him the story of my life. His Australian colleague just sort of looked at me and mumbled: ‘Youse getting in or what?’ He didn’t care where I was from or who I was. There was an instant respect for me as a human being. He didn’t care less if I was a working class boy on the run. That is what Australians do: they accept you for who and what you are and that is the end of it. Or at least, that is what it used to be like. Don’t forget I arrived in the fifties, before the rampant nationalism we’ve got now, before people were called names and distinctions were being made between ‘I am a sixth-generation white Australian’ and you, the migrant, are not. As a migrant you are more aware of that distinction. It wasn’t until I began to make a name for myself amongst the literary culture, as it were, that I was called a bloody Brit or a Pom. Among the working class: never. Among the elite: often. Q: Because with working-class people you are as good as the work you do. You are either a good stockman or a bad one. AM: Exactly. But at the same time: when I became a stockman, I answered an advertisement in the paper that said ‘no Yanks, Poms or Boongs need apply’. After I’d been there for a while, I finally had the courage to say I was from England. They said: ‘O really, what part?’ It didn’t matter anymore. A lot of people I knew used very racist language towards Aborigines, although they had Aboriginal friends. But that was ‘Frank, mate, he’s alright.’ They were theoretical racists, not practical ones. I’m not so sure about the intelligentsia. Q: But you are not saying that Australians, especially during the White Australia Policy, weren’t racist? AM: No, of course they were. But you had to be visibly different, look different, to be discriminated against. Aborigines, Chinese, blacks; I’ve seen them spat at, the door of the bus close just before they were able to get in. Things like that. If you are Jewish too, you must be constantly wondering whether something is racist or ‘just the way things are’. That is difficult anyway. If somebody is nasty to me, I just think ‘you rude bastard’. If you are sensitive to racism or anti-Semitism because of your experiences, you might interpret the same incident differently. But asking me, as a white person, to talk about racism, is difficult. I am part of the ruling colour, so how can I see? Q: In ‘Ashes’ the daughter says that there is still a duality in her father. Is he English still or is he Australian. Are you saying something about yourself here? 276
AM: I think that is a slight simplification. I even think I was talking about my brother there. I don’t know. I barrack for Australia if there is a match on and I get interested, which hardly ever happens. I think the thing about home is, if you build a disciplined history and a past like I have in Melbourne, it becomes home. The place where you are becomes home. There is no magical, definitive meaning for home. Home is where you are. Am I unambivalent about it? Of course not. Displacement is not necessarily to do with moving around the world, but with the soul. An uneasiness that makes you feel that there is something else somewhere that fits more easily. For me that started with the war, and after that with being sent away. Those things made me feel I didn’t fit, didn’t belong, and that I would have to leave to find a place where I did belong. That is probably part of the reason why it is a quest for a lot of my characters. I know that feeling intimately, so I know how to write about that. To me writing is therapy. I like the light and shade. The truth is in the shadows. The sort of truth I look for is an indirect truth. If you look at it too directly, you lose sight of it. There is something in the truth that is always elusive. Facts are facts and they are sacred. I always make sure that I get my facts right. But truth is something else. It isn’t an object of logic, it is an object of feeling. Q: So you look at this question of belonging from all angles, in all your books, but in a way that you won’t really answer it, in fear of losing the essence of the question. AM: Exactly. It is my quest. My own holy grail. But I don’t particularly want to know the answer. Eliot says that we can only stand so much reality. Reality is the enemy of dreams and thought. That search is the furnace, the driver. Q: Is that search connected to your migrant experience? AM: I think the migrant experience is both the result of me feeling like that and the cause of the literary quest. The yearning was already there before I left. But leaving made it more pertinent, it gave it an extra dimension. He tells the story of the new book (Lovesong). One of the main characters is the opposite of Emily in Conditions. Q: In the book, one of the Americans says to Emily once she is pregnant: ‘Once you are a mother, that is what you are. You can never get back to your former self.’ To me that sounds a lot like what you say in a lot of your books: ‘migrancy is an irreversible condition, you can never go back.’ AM: Like birth. Right. It is interesting that you read it like that, you being a migrant as well. It is interesting to me, because nobody has ever commented on that before. If 277
I read most of the criticism that has been written about my books, I find it, mostly, superficial and silly. And also, it is like, especially in academia, they are afraid of taking up a position. Like that is the worst thing you can do. All my writing is about migrancy, there is no getting around that. Even if you don’t want to see it, it is still there. Q: Do you think people read you with your migrant experience in mind or as an Australian writer? AM: As an Australian writer. Except when you talk to other migrants. Rai Gaita did, because he recognises it, as a migrant. I think that for Australians it is difficult to read it like that. It is not on the radar of non-migrants. Q: Can you tell me how you received the criticism of Landscape of Farewell? AM: I was a little scared about what people would say about the book, because in Australia there is this whole discussion about legitimately appropriating the point of view of a victim of something you haven’t been yourself a victim of. The voice of Aborigines, of Holocaust-survivors; that is a minefield you want to stay away from. So you have to be careful. But it deserves to be written about. What I find strange is that hardly anything has been written about that massacre. It is the biggest massacre of white people in Australia. My view on that is that historians are unable at this time to attribute to Aborigines a comparable strategic intelligence to that possessed by Europeans. That is what this book does. It recognises Aboriginal leadership. Q: But that is one of the reasons why to me this book is very non-Australian, or let’s say, very European in its perspective. AM: I agree. It is based in the very European understanding that history is layered, a thick mass of contradictions and connections. Q: And it is very clearly, like most of your books, written by an outsider. An onlooker, as you define your characters often. AM: I love that. You are absolutely right. I can never be a fairdinkum Australian. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in England. By then you are formed. And what you bring with you is your cultural hoard. I can pose as an Australian, I have even recently told a footy joke in a footy pub, but I have to rehearse for it. Sure, after fifty years of living here, I am Australian. But I am also, still, an outsider, an onlooker. And that is what I write about. Q: You have often said that the writers you look up to are people like Joseph Roth, Kafka, Musil. All Jewish, all outsiders. Trying and not succeeding to belong. 278
AM: Yes, you’re right. There is recognition there. But you do have to get the facts right, especially if your characters don’t belong in the world they live in. Q: That is fact finding. That is what the outsider does. The insider does not have to do that, because to him the facts are part of normality. He isn’t scared to get them wrong. AM: Never thought about it like that. It is the insecurity of the outsider, you’re right. On the other hand, I also believe in the liberty of being displaced. When I lived in the village in Somerset I realised that everybody was bound to their spot by convention. Everybody knew where you should be on Thursday mornings. No freedom. In The Ancestor Game Lang Tzu burns the book and throws away the mirror in order to gain his freedom from the oppression of tradition, which determines his life for him. Extraterroriality, which is both liberty and terror. I am not saying he solves the problem, but it is his quest. To be free, not to be bound. The Tivington Nott is about the power of the outsider to disrupt. Like in Australia. A handful of white men on horseback were able to ride in and destroy a whole civilisation. Q: But what you give the outsider in The Tivington Nott is a horse called ‘home’. AM: Again, that is the first time that somebody has recognised that. I planted it there, but not for somebody to ever discover. Yes, I get what you are saying: everything seems to get back to that same theme: home, belonging, outsidership. Q: Never able to go back. Exile. AM: Yes. You are absolutely right. I think that even I have been in denial about it to myself. Q: In The Ancestor Game there is a quintessential Flying Dutchman, a warrior who travels for years and when he finally comes home, a home he has been longing for, he can’t remember his name. AM: And they give him a new identity. Q: Like Powlett in Prochownik’s Dream. After you leave, you need a new identity. Your old one was lost when you left. AM: Similar, isn’t it? Q: You keep coming back to these same themes every time. It is almost like you think: ‘They still haven’t heard what I’ve got to say, so I have to keep coming back to it until they do.’ AM: I am the kind of writer who writes for therapy. Who would commit suicide without the writing, because life would have no meaning for him. That kind of writer does not elect to write about a subject, the subject is forced upon him. I never know 279 what I am going to write about. It just happens. We can only write about what we can write about. I don’t choose what I write about, it chooses me. Last night, after our first conversation, I went back to the new book and I had to laugh. Here it is, on the first page: ‘They thought of him as a foreigner. He knew that.’ ‘He wanted to go home. Would he still belong in his own world?’ When I started this book I said to my daughter that I wanted to write a simple love-story. She immediately said that that would be impossible for me. And she was right. Q: So why do you keep coming back to it? AM: Home is not just a literal thing. Home is also ‘reaching the ultimate’, a place where you are known. It is even dying. Or getting your head around the fact that the human race doesn’t really belong here. We realise that we occupy this short space in time, a fleeting moment. The span of human existence is short. I think we as human beings are uncomfortable with that. That brings up existential questions about who we are and why we are here. Q: That is true, but different writers address different parts of those questions. Yours are to do with home, belonging etc. In the new book John is, again, a migrant in someone else’s country. And both he and Sabiha are trying to figure out where they belong, how foreign they are. AM: I understand what you mean and you are right. It must be that there is something unresolved or unresolvable to me. The thing is: I was reading a bit of Kafka this morning and he basically says that human beings are in essence isolated and solitary. We have moments of contact with other people, and they are nice and pleasant, but ultimately we are alone. I feel very impressed by that a lot of the time. The fact that our social selves are illusory and our real selves are solitary. I feel that very strongly. Like an outsider. It is dangerous. There is the lure of the void, the gravity drawing you towards your dark self. Writing, for me, sits between the social engagement level and the void. I am caught in the darkness of the void and writing is my attempt to fight my way out. Writing is the thing that saves me. After I’m dead there will be something left of me. I won’t be completely lost. Q: In The Ancestor Game somebody says: ‘I’m still here. Looking away has not got rid of me.’ Is that part of it? Having to make yourself heard? AM: Yes. I absolutely have to have a voice, yes. I want my view of the world to be heard and responded to. It is a way of communicating. Q: With whom? 280
AM: Maybe with myself. Maybe it is me who is not hearing myself. When I am writing a book I am not thinking about the readers. Of course you have to make it accessible, I am not Joyce. I am not a mould-breaker. Home to me is when I am writing, because there I am at liberty to talk about everything. I think that a lot of artists only have one topic that they keep coming back to. A preoccupation. Look, I feel as Australian as I can possibly get. But I also realise that most of my friends have a migrant background. And the Australians I am fond of don’t feel they belong either. Everybody has this longing to belong. Q: In The Sitters your main protagonist says that his father has made it perfectly clear that the fact the son migrated ‘has killed him’. Is there guilt for having left in your case as well? AM: Yes. My father, when I left, knew that it would be forever. My mother tried to convince him and herself that it would only be for two years, but he knew. I didn’t realise how much pain I put her through. Now I’ve got children I understand, but then I didn’t. The thing is, when you’re sixteen… I knew that I would always have a strong, loving home to go back to. That knowledge made me… when I was in Queensland it was the guy I worked for who wrote to my mother. Every week. And she wrote back. He told me often that I had to do it, but I didn’t feel the need. ‘They know I’m here, they know I love them, they love me. No need to write.’ The guilt comes from the gradual realisation that I left them. They loved me and I left them with nothing. I made a choice and I didn’t choose them. Guilt has consequences. In my case it is a feeling of superstition: if I relax in a feeling of success, of happiness, then God will say: ‘I’m going to get you!’ You’ve made people unhappy, so you don’t deserve it. It is like belonging would be betrayal. I’m aware that I don’t belong to any community in the world in any final, deep, provable, reliable way. Mine is a perpetual outsidership. And that is where the energy in the writing comes from. The belonging-not-belonging thing, this conflict, this struggle to belong, to not belong. In the new book both people are caught, again, between those two. The energy comes from struggling with the problem, with the ambivalence. That is the condition of my life. Living somewhere where I do and don’t want to live, for instance. Nothing is ever solved. Q: Would it have made any difference to you and your writing if people had acknowledged what was in there? The migrancy, I mean. 281
AM: It would have been terrific. People don’t usually see what I write about. I had come to the point that I thought: I am the only one who sees it. But writing fiction is not like writing memoir. It is responding to the prompts of your imagination and the understanding that they come from somewhere. The unconscious, this big heaving mass that has little lights in it that guide you. Q: At the same time you say you don’t make anything up. AM: For me accurate observation is the most important thing. Making stuff up is not interesting enough for me. But you still have to make a story of the truth. Q: That is another thing. In the last book Max Otto wonders who has ownership of stories. And whose it is once you’ve mixed it up with your own story, which happens by the fact that it is you who is telling it. AM: ‘Comrad Pawel’ is mine because I wrote it. But it was told to me by Max Blatt, in a few sentences. Later, when I showed it to him, he was moved and said: ‘Alex, you could have been there.’ Which is what Dougald says to Max. There was a flash of joy; finally I knew I could do it. I wrote the story, but the voice is Max Blatt’s. It is a complex affair. The presence of story is mysterious. Q: The last sentence of your article in ‘The Victorian Writer’ is ‘There is nowhere else now’. That sounds a bit sad, like you realise that there are no choices left, that this is it, as far as home is concerned. AM: In one of the books I say: ‘You can never go back’. I realised yesterday, after we talked, that the book I am writing now has biblical connotations. So I was reading Genesis and the rest of it: full of displacement, exile, belonging. Coming and going and moving. What is all that? Not just Jewish, it is human. The first bloody bit is Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden. Wandering in the wilderness, not knowing where you belong, being promised a place, a home and never quite finding it. That is the human story. People pretend to be at home, they settle for what they’ve got. It is everybody’s problem. The only difference is that I have physically been through it. I know what it feels like.
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APPENDIX 2
Unpublished interview with John Mateer 8 and 9 June 2008, Perth
Q: How are you doing? JM: I’m not quite sure how relevant Australia is to my writing at the moment. In the past I felt really strongly about participating in Australian literature, but I don’t now. Some of my past work was shaped by Australia negatively, some affirmatively, some was overshadowed by the country but not shaped by it. In my first book there is the problem not only with what my techniques are, but also what my references are. What position am I speaking from, what language am I using? To the second question, the simple answer would be: English. But that is too easy. Because that implies that it is connected to English literature or even to an Australian literary tradition, and it is not. Could it be South African then? Again, the answer is no. That complicated matters, so I had to figure that one out first. Personally I was in a very traumatized state. Partly because of my family, partly because of South Africa, partly because of the emigration. Because of that I got confused about language. I was reading French and Afrikaans literature, but mostly in English translations, understanding only part of it. It made me write certain poems in Afrikaans first, translating some of them, acknowledging only part of that. At that point in my life the real poetic language seemed to me to be Afrikaans, my second language. I was interested in investigating that. The other thing was the question of authenticity. So much emphasis in Australia was on the question ‘what is proper Australian literature?’ My typical migrant interest therefore was in how the language does not work, or at least my language did not seem to work, to describe this Australia or, for that matter, what was in my head. I was trying to write poems in English, within an Afrikaans tradition, in Australia. That was complicated. What I saw happen within South African writing, the political 283
dynamic of it, was that there were two poles of possibility: you were either a bourgeois, liberal, white Apartheid-supporter or you were on the side of the revolution. My family certainly was not on the side of the revolution. We weren’t black, did not believe that communism would save us. But we weren’t on the Afrikaner, white, National Party, Apartheid-is-the-only-answer- side either. So we emigrated twice. We went to Canada after the Soweto uprising, then my father took us back to South Africa, where we left again for Australia when I was seventeen. Since I was five years old we were in a constant state of migration. So I felt I couldn’t claim I was South African, or that I had a political relationship with the country. When I came to Australia I felt totally isolated. I didn’t belong to South Africa or to Australia, and the language problem was a consequence of that. Because I didn’t feel able to say anything, I became interested in language as a phenomenon, as an idea. I looked at language in South-Africa and wondered why people like Coetzee and Gordimer did not say out loud what I thought was obvious: that language, the English language, had become the problem. Afrikaans was a problem too, because it was fascist and extreme. But at least it belonged to the country, was naturalised in a way. This problem with the language fascinated me. And being displaced to Australia exacerbated this predicament. Q: Can we talk about your personal life for a moment? You were born in Roodepoort. How did your parents feel about South Africa? Did they feel South African? JM: I think that was the question for most English-speaking, white South Africans before the end of Apartheid. After the end of Apartheid it changed; they did feel South African then. But before that there was always this doubt: what are we really? If you spoke English in South Africa, the Afrikaners never allowed you to feel South African. They had older rights, you were an ‘uitlander’. Q: The first time your family migrated, it was to Canada. You were six years old. How was that? JM: I don’t remember much more than the small world between our house and the school, which was across the road. There were lots of immigrants there, especially at the school. The only Canadian I can remember was from Newfoundland and to Canadians, that is not even part of Canada. One day we were getting ready for the school photograph. You could wear what you wanted and I chose to go in my school uniform from my school in Johannesburg. The only other boy dressed similarly in a suit was the Nigerian. Although he was black, I suddenly understood what we had in 284
common: we were both Africans. It was a type of crazy logic I held unto, because it gave some sort of stability and belonging. South Africa normally was all about fragmenting things and dividing people and making them fight one another, but this gave me a sort of comradeship. Other South Africans usually don’t feel that with me, but I feel that with them. It is a strange, non-reciprocal relationship. Q: After Canada you went back to South Africa. You write about your schooldays. Can you elaborate on that? JM: What I find slightly disturbing is the lack of memory I have of those times. Maybe that has got to do with… I’ll tell you a story. A couple of years ago one of my books was reviewed in Eureka Street. The reviewer put some biographical notes in there and said that I had left South Africa during ‘The State of Emergency’; in quotes, being ironic. Reading that I thought: you don’t understand how serious the situation was. We are talking martial law, tanks in the streets, people shooting other people, people dying. It was an undeclared war. And if I had stayed any longer, I would have been one of the soldiers. That is nothing to be ironic about. It is actually disturbing to me, this undoing of the historicity of experience. One of the problems with Australia is that they don’t take this sort of thing seriously. Your experiences, your memories, what you saw and hear, get effaced. Or misinterpreted. What my father said about Breytenbach [that he ‘was a shitstirrer’] was nothing out of the ordinary. At that time, that was what everybody in my world said. A lot of people did not agree with Apartheid, but they saw it as the only thing standing between them and all out war. They were scared that there would be massacres of white people. Or a situation like in Angola, where people had had to leave with just the clothes on their backs. Partly this idea was created by all sorts of propaganda. Not just from the government, but the Pan Africanist Congress-slogan ‘One Settler, One Bullet’ would not have helped calm things down much. But in my experience I found a lot of black people a lot more wholesome and psychologically coherent than the white people. Because at least they knew where and who they were. They were literally grounded. And that was probably the reason why there wasn’t a civil war. But at the time it certainly felt like there was going to be one, fuelled by the government, because it allowed them to keep power. But about Breytenbach: one thing that is interesting to me was that then being a poet was a significant act, in a way it isn’t in Australia. There was resistance in it, politics, even a revolutionary, almost romantic element. Q: In the article, you write that the language he used opened up something for you. 285
JM: Breytenbach had travelled extensively through Europe and was influenced by Spanish, Portugese and even Dutch literature. When you read him in Afrikaans, and knowing that he was in jail, it was like you got an education. You learned about European literature, Buddhism, structuralism, Chinese ideas of painting. But most of all you learned about the language, the material he used. Taking Afrikaans outside of what it had been used for in day-to-day practice: to hold up a fascist state, claiming it as his own, for him to use for a very different goal. It is a poetry of enthusiasm, hope, love, openness and energy. In that way he was attacking Afrikaans, opening it up to different uses. I found that exhilarating. Also because there are no comparable South African poets who write in English. Especially not poets who are both political and lyrical. Q: Your family emigrated again, this time to Australia, when you were 17? JM: Well, actually, I came here on my own when I was 15. The idea was that I would finish my schooling and live with some of my father’s friends. When that didn’t work out I went back to South Africa for two years and then migrated with the family when I was about to be conscripted into the army. Q: When you emigrated with your family, were you included in that decision? JM: No, that is not the way my father operated. I doubt if even my mother had anything to say about that. I think the feeling was: South Africa is not going to work as a country. A painful truth that has to do with the history of colonisation. My parents were keenly aware that something had to be done. In a lot of ways my father was not a very nice person. But every year when he was doing his taxes, he worked out how many houses needed to be built for the population. He was from a poor background and he realised that you can’t treat people badly forever; one day they are going to react to that. But doing his sums he also realised that the country would not be able to afford to give them even the basics and that troubled him. He would do his taxes and say to us: ‘With the money I made I just bought them a tank for the army.’ And he was disgusted by it. People ask me why I came to Australia. Personally I would not have chosen Australia, because I feel Australia is continuing the colonial project. I think that is one of the reasons why my work can’t register in Australia; because this is not what people want to hear. Especially not from a white South African, who is living here. Q: Do you remember arriving in Australia? 286
JM: We flew into Perth at 1 am. The airport was tiny, all the city lights had been switched off at midnight, there were only lights on along the arterial roads and it was dead silent. I thought it was surreal. Things were not very happy with my family, we lived in the suburbs, it was my last months of school…It was a disaster, basically. I stopped talking, literally. I found it impossible to engage people through language. I retreated. And I guess, the migrant part of the story…I have heard this from more people, it is not just my own opinion…There is this feeling in Australia, and maybe especially in Perth, that we are not interested in your background, your story, your history, your experiences. Come and play sport and don’t talk about those things: you are in Australia now, everything is fine. So for me it was impossible to find points of reference to talk about the past. Nobody wanted to know. I did feel that they judged me, though. I was white and from South Africa, so I must be one of the evil-doers. That made it even more difficult to talk or find a connection. So I stopped. Another reason for me not talking was that there is a deafness in Australia. Not just to certain stories and experiences, but also to language. English is a utilitarian, non- performative, precise, non-poetic language. The Australian mutation is that even more so, in the way it is a product of a rough-and-ready convict, explorer, coloniser experience. It is very shallow in most areas. It is great in irony, but less so in sincerity and emotional dept. That is what I was writing about at the beginning. What I came to understand later was that language, especially for English-speaking South Africans, is a problem anyway. The concern was always: you are either with us or against us. You are either radical or an Apartheid-supporter. This was the political polarity. What this did to poetry was that it created a real dilemma: if you wanted to write a love poem, people would accuse you of being bourgeois and self-absorbed. So people didn’t. And that is how we lost the language, because you loose the emotional correspondence between language and intention. My early poems were struggling with this. But what they were also trying to do was say something without explicating it. They were trying to create a poetic language of images or suggestions, without statements. I presume I was self-censoring, in a way. I didn’t want to tell people something about South Africa, or about myself, in a language they expected. I didn’t want to say: I didn’t support Apartheid, or: whites are bastards. I didn’t want to enter into this language of pre-determined meanings. The resistance and the silencing, therefore, was partly to do with that. There are characters in Coetzee’s books that fall silent after a while. They realise that they run into a barrier, that people on the other 287 side are not responding. Silence is the only way to retain their power. In a way that was what I was doing. There is power in silence: I am not giving you what you expect me to. Australia is clearly a colonial project, in a way that is quite shocking to outsiders. There are very close similarities between South Africa and Australia. Someone once said to me, while we were talking about Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, that the thought had entered her mind that if there would have been more Aboriginals in Australia, there could have been a situation like that in South Africa. There could have been a war. As there was in the past. Outsiders are shocked by the deprivation and poverty of the Aborigines. Australians are used to it; that is just the way it is. Because of the evolution of Australia that is not something people struggle with. It creates all sorts of problems if you do. If you draw parallels between South Africa and Australia they find that very, very discomforting. Putting it in a post-colonial context means nothing to them, because they don’t see the resemblance to South Africa. Or Zimbabwe or India. They don’t recognise themselves at all. And that is where the connection breaks down. Q: It must be difficult for a writer and especially for a poet to feel not able to talk about what concerns him. JM: It has strange effects and you can see that in my first two books. After I wrote my third, with some poems about South Africa in it, my editor said: ‘I’m glad you’ve got that out of your system. Now you can get on with the project of being in Australia.’ The thing is: when you efface history, you get stuck very quickly. So after a while I made a decision. To not mitigate, modify, make things easier for the readers, but segment the writings. Say: these are South African poems. If you don’t want or can’t understand them, leave them and read these other ones, they are about something else. That is what I did in Barefoot Speech and Loanwords. I had to, because my experiences were exceeding the frames of the language context and cultural context. You can see that in the reviews for the first four, five books: the critics don’t understand what I am doing or saying and that makes them angry. They blame me for the fact that they can’t hear me: talk to us in a way we can understand. That is a context-problem, the Australian context. In South Africa the work at least registers, it is part of something, it has got a deeper historicity, they get what I am talking about. I’m not saying the work has been well received in South Africa. It has hardly been reviewed at all, because their feeling is: if you are not in South Africa, 288
you are not one of us. But at least over there they don’t do this partial reading of the work and I don’t suffer as much from negation. You know the thing with poetry is…to understand poetry you have to accommodate it before you understand it. You have to give it some space in your mind or in your heart and allow it to be there, just give it some time there and see if it resonates. To do that, you have to take a risk. And if you are suspicious of the work, you can’t give it the room it needs. I think that is the predicament with my work. I think people are scared that letting it into their hearts will be an unpleasant experience; plates are going to brake. And then it is easier to just refuse it. Q: Why would they think it would be unpleasant? JM: Especially the poems with an Aboriginal subject are problematic. The literature in Australia is still content to keep a divide between Aboriginal and white literature. That barrier is very well sustained. And if you cross it, or say something about it, it becomes very problematic. I am still wondering what to do with those poems. I don’t want to publish them now and I don’t even know if they will ever be published. It is amazingly divisive. And most people I have asked to look at the poems and advise me on a way forward have responded in an incredibly shallow way. Only one person has given it the care I think the matter deserved, the rest said: ‘You’ve got to do what you think is right’ and left it at that. They tell me it is going to cause trouble, that there is a political problem, but don’t want to get involved. They don’t seem to recognize that what is at issue here is articulacy in Australia. What poetic language is, is imagining. And part of imagining in Australia, is imagining Aboriginal presence. I don’t know how anybody thinks they can be a significant writer without doing that. To me that is absurd. If Australia is your context, you have to look at the deeper histories, the deeper experiences, and yourself in relation to those. And to do that you have to look at Aboriginal issues, you have to think about the predicament of language; what relationship is there between the sounds and the sights and the names? All of these deeper resonances that make the poetic, in my view. So the laxity with which people treated my predicament, which I see as crucial, continues to shock me. It is not just my choice whether I want to publish or not. Every serious poetic act in Australia has to somehow grapple with the language and the alienation of that. We have to start a conversation about how we can open up the language to these other, invisible languages and presences. And for an Aboriginal writer to say: ‘You can’t do that’, is like saying ‘Get back on the plane’. And maybe that is what I should do. Because 289
what I know now is that I am not allowed to be part of the project, the project of de- colonising this country. I hoped they would have said: ‘OK, John, you went a little bit too far in some of the poems, but as a gesture it is a good start’. Instead of that I was attacked and made to feel even more like an outsider. That is very distressing. To be told that although I’ve lived here for 20 years I am still just a foreigner. Maybe that is true and I haven’t been accepting the truth of that and that is my problem. But it isn’t even possible to talk about it, start a conversation, a discussion. That makes me feel incredibly alienated from Australia. And again: negated. I think part of the problem as well is that Australian poetry is largely English poetry, with, from the seventies, a bit of American influence. So the techniques I use, which come from European and African poetry, are alien to them. Their matrix is different to mine. Even if they have read Breytenbach, they have read him in English. And he is not important in English, he is important in Afrikaans. That makes the work challenging within Australia. Another thing is that the work is very serious, very insistent, very moral and ethical. That is not common in Australia. The lack of irony seems to distress people here. It makes them uncomfortable and therefore angry. The thing is: my categorisation is complicated. A Chinese-Australian poet writes from a distinct category that is given to him. People may not understand his work, but they accept that they don’t and ‘blame’ that on cultural difference. It makes it difficult for that writer, because he has to write from a category that has been given to him and not one he has chosen himself. But at least he exists. The anxiety with me and my work is that it is not clear what status they can attribute to me and my work. What position are we allowing? And I am not willing to make it easier for them either. A couple of years they were setting up a database of Australian multicultural writers, I think at the Australian National Library. I got this form, but I wrote back to them and said: ‘I might want to be included in this, but do you realise that there is no position for me?’ And the reason for this was they hadn’t thought that anyone from a so-called multicultural background could have English as a first language. I thought that was a gap, they didn’t. So after that I didn’t want to be included in the category ‘migrant writer’ anymore. Because it ghetto-ises you, and with the wrong criteria as well. Sure, if you are not in that category, you may not belong anywhere, but maybe you can go roaming. The problem with migrant writing in Australia as well is that you are expected to ascribe to the migrant themes that Australia expects of you: ‘we’ve escaped a terrible situation, it is much better here, I am happy to be here, but we keep 290 speaking our language.’ In a sense that is a true narrative, or at least it is or was for a lot of people. But it also disengages them from a larger context. Q: You wrote: ‘Estrangement is part of my work. I don’t feel like a migrant writer, but I do feel like a foreign writer.’ Can you elaborate on that? JM: After the age of five I have felt foreign. As a migrant in Canada, as a white person in South Africa, as a migrant in Australia: I have always felt foreign, displaced. So much emphasis in the discourse in Australia is placed on becoming Australian. Why? If they felt secure in who they were in this country, they wouldn’t need to emphasise it so much. For me as a writer it has certain advantages as well, being a foreigner. For me as a person it is anxiety-provoking, but in writing it gives you larger affiliations, connections to other foreigners. Do I feel emotionally Australian? That is a difficult one. I feel connected to the landscape, especially here in Western Australia. I like the plants, the animals, the vastness, the birds. The human culture of Australia doesn’t thrill me as much. A lot of it is very aggressive, very masculine, very non-emotional. And the population of Australia doesn’t really engage in its literature. It is not part of anyone’s life in the general sense. So if you are interested in literature, you are almost automatically alienated from Australian culture. A lot of Australian culture is even openly hostile to the arts in general. Q: When you write about what you call the Australian colonial project, do you think people get angry about that because you are an outsider, or a foreigner, as you call it? JM: In the recent review of Elsewhere in ABR there is this very interesting turn of phrase. She says, ‘Mateer, being white…’…The problem is, and maybe this is absurd, I don’t really accept that I am white. Because that is a political category that Apartheid created. Why would I accept that category? It is a discursive category, so to refuse that is a discursive act. White doesn’t exist, white is a discussion, not a given. To call someone white is like calling them black: it is simplifying the circumstance. I understand that saying you are black, for instance, is a useful political act. But it is also very shallow, because black people are much more than that. A Zulu-person in Johannesburg is much more than black. There are a whole set of cultural and historical and linguistic circumstances that he is a product of. Black is the least interesting of them, like white is the least interesting thing you can say about me. Except to make a point, like the reviewer was making: ‘he is one of those’. But the problem is: they don’t know if I am one of those. Maybe I am not an Apartheid- supporter who came here cowardly fleeing his country after bleeding it dry. Maybe I 291 am someone who was brought here by his father and didn’t want to be here and still doesn’t want to be here. But that is a story, that is not a category. And they are not interested in a story, they are just interested in an easy way of categorising you. There is not much power in being interested. The power is in including or excluding and it is more powerful to exclude. You are either an insider or you are an outsider. If you are something else, you are not spoken about. Which is often my status. The problem is that I can’t change the categories. The only thing is do my work and hope that people read it. I have come to realise that I am not really an Australian poet. Look at the work: what am I doing? I am breaking down categories. What is that? That is anti- Apartheid. I could say: I am a migrant writer. But it wouldn’t enhance the reading of the work, it would reduce it. I could say: I am a white Australian writer. But that wouldn’t enhance the work either. I could say: I wrote those Aboriginal poems as a way of becoming Australian, of establishing an Australian presence. But what I try to do instead is establish the reception for it. I didn’t ascribe a position to myself that would ground it. That is why it was so difficult for people to accept. Maybe the fact that things are so unclear is what is interesting. It destabilises everything and that is important. The problem with that is that it makes it problematic as well, because of course I want to be heard and this way I can’t. I used to think, in the first two or three books, ‘what have I done wrong that they can’t hear me?’ With the third book it changed a bit, because it won a prize and I thought my readers were used to me now. But I was wrong. Now I know that the essence of the work is in the fact that they can’t hear. That my position is that: ambiguous, outside, interrogating positions, independent, asking the questions. I have to accept that with this comes being negated. In the second book, Anachronism, there were poems that tried to be Australian, tried to locate themselves there, in the multicultural space, tried to bridge the gap. But that didn’t work. I tried to be accommodating, even aspiring to it. But after I realised that even doing that wasn’t getting me anywhere, I started to distance myself and write what I wanted to write. Australian poetry, for instance, can’t talk about something that is mythological and present. People are too rational, they can’t believe. That is why they have problems with Aboriginal spirituality as well. It is their 292 problem with imagination. So even though we speak the same language, at some point we don’t understand each other anymore. Partly what I try to deal with is the problem of the language itself. That is my struggle. Because most of the readers and critics don’t see that as an issue, they don’t recognise it. They only know one English and don’t realise that people like me have got multiple Englishes. That makes it elusive to them. From my point of view I have to deal with different stresses in the language, with the fact that there are certain connotations or ironies with a certain word in one English and not in the other. In Burning Swans I’ve got a poem that ends with the word ‘shame’. In South Africa we use that word in many different ways. For instance, if you see a cute baby, you say ‘och, shame!’. You can also use it in a sympathetic way. If somebody’s relative has died, you say ‘o, shame!’. When I wrote it in a poem about Australia, I realised that it would probably not resonate like that, that it was a South African moment in an Australian poem. What it does for me, is it marks out the difference. And that is good. I’ve recently re-written that poem and left out the word ‘shame’ all together. It is now just a colon and a dash. That way it is even more clear that there is a gap there. A visible one. In the language. And between me and the reader. What becomes important then is the mis-recognition of intended meaning. That is what it is about. And also it is saying: there was a word here once, but you can’t understand it, so I am not giving it to you. That is becoming an important perspective: to disengage from certain things. Almost disengage from Australia. Q: Can you elaborate on the problems you are having with the poems that address Aboriginality? JM: I think the depth of reading that these poems need can be achieved. What the poems are trying to do, I’m not sure that comes across. Interesting here is the discussion about what is permissible and what is not. I’ve discussed this on my travels, with different people in different countries and my conclusion is that the conditions that make this kind of censoring permissible are very particular to Australia. They are not understood in any other context; seen as fairly bizarre, in fact. My friends abroad are confused by the fact that I am considered to be the problem here. I have done something wrong, my detractors are not censoring me at all. The complication here, I think, is that there is no debate possible about this. Not just about my poems, I mean, but about this issue. That is part of the Australian predicament and frankly I am getting a little tired of it. I’ve tried, over the years, to do the work, to get 293
the connection, to open something up. But all that has greeted me was silence and I don’t have the energy for it anymore. What has surprised me is that after the poems were translated in Japanese, they attracted more, and more intelligent attention over there than they have here. Maybe that is because the Japanese don’t feel implicated, so can say or feel anything they want. They’ve got a freedom that people don’t have here. At the moment I feel like leaving Australia altogether. That is the only thing left for me now. For years I have thought that there was something wrong with me or with my work, because it wasn’t doing anything. But then I started travelling oversees and realised that the refusal wasn’t produced by the work, or by me, but by Australia itself. The further afield I go, the less reason I see to return. In the past I would have said that my Aboriginal-poems were the core of my concern. They are potentially important to the culture, the issues in them could lead to some sort of re-vivifying of language within Australia. I would have said: that is the focus. But now that has been refused as well, what else can I do? Water doesn’t flow up hill. I don’t write about Australia anymore, to tell you the truth. I want to be done with it. Q: What do they think about your poetry in South Africa? JM: There is a problem there as well. If you have left, they feel you’ve betrayed the country, so they don’t want to include you. A couple of years ago I was included in a major anthology of South African poetry, so that was very important to me. But at the moment, what I am hearing from South African publishers is that if you don’t live in the country, they are not really interested. They say that all their writers live in the country. That is not exactly true, though. All their white writers do, but a lot of their non-white writers live oversees. That is an interesting take on the racial issue, isn’t it? It doesn’t change anything for me, though. Q: It gives you a strange in-between-ness, doesn’t it? JM: Yes. Neither the Australians or the South Africans accept the work. Q: You wrote ‘That I, suffering the shattered selfhood of an ex-white South-African would have no place within the discourses here.’ Its almost in-between two traumas, isn’t? JM: Absolutely. I was reading ‘Talking with Yagan’s Head’ once in public and a Zimbabwean poet said to me: ‘It seems like you left South Africa only to enter into a worse situation.’ That is true. In some sense, what South Africa was Australia is now. Disposessed black people, white rule. 294
Q: What does ‘ex-white South African’ mean, by the way? JM: In South Africa, once you’ve left you are an ex-South African. There isn’t the phenomena they’ve got here, where you are an ex-pat even if you’ve lived abroad for the last 40 years. So what I meant there is ‘having been something’ as a status. And ‘ex-white’ is the title of my book of South African poems that will come out in Germany soon. Not white anymore. It means refusing the naturalisation of being white. The connotations that go with that. The title of my last booklet of South African poems is Makwerekwere , which means Foreigners. It is what black South Africans call other black Africans, because they can’t understand the language they speak, a language that sounds to them like makwerekwere. I think being ex-white is something like makwerekwere. Foreigner. It is my way of specifying the dynamics. What is white? What is a white person in Australia or in South Africa? I want to ask that question, blow up the categories. I think racial categories are quite bizarre. If I try to explain the categorisation of Aborigines in Australia to people abroad, they think it is one of the strangest things they have ever heard. That you have to be recognised by other Aborigines to be an Aboriginal…what? It is a problematic discourse, isn’t it? And what does it say about an identity that exists outside of the categories that people put you in? In Australia I see that people talk about identity as a form of politics, when in fact, in a metaphysical sense, you want your identity to be free. That is a conflict for me. I’ve got a problem with the Aboriginal insistence on an identity that is connected to landscape and culture. If you want that, you probably have to go to war for that as well. Q: You write about ownership and say that what the Aborigines seem to do is the exact opposite of what you do, do away with ownership. Ownership of self, as well. JM: I think that was when I realised, in the Aboriginal poems, that I had to step back from the whole issue. I had thought that we had more in common than we actually had. I thought there was a camaraderie that wasn’t there. I could see myself distancing myself and concluding that maybe the position of the foreigner was mine after all. Kim Scott, in his book, calls me a stranger. And he doesn’t mean the stranger as an honoured guest, but the stranger as an unnecessary extra person. If that is what I am, that is what I am. That is my status. It seems inevitable to me.